This article originally appeared in the Financial Post. Below is an excerpt from the article, which can be read in full here.
By Richard C. Owens, October 18, 2022
World Health Organization (WHO) consultations on pandemic preparedness reconvened last weekend based on an ambitious Statement. It’s written in the usual vague bureaucratic prose meant to disguise organizational failures while extracting funds. But it is a massive power grab that will set back pandemic preparedness.
The WHO insists member states commit “to a new model of innovation governance …” and “ensure that health innovation provides life-saving technology, know-how and information to all countries as quickly as possible, regardless of who can pay the most. This includes … access to diagnostics, vaccines and therapeutics in all parts of the globe.” To support these confiscatory powers, the WHO demands member states “ensure that their ministries of finance” commit “a recurrent investment in national budget plans … rather than a discretionary “cost” that is the first to go in a fiscal crisis.” In other words, risk-free dollars, unimpeded by the needs of the citizens who earned them in the first place.
What hubris! These trans-national bureaucrats, apparently untrained in IP and innovation systems, demand “a new model of innovation governance” — ignoring centuries of hard-won achievement building the one we have. The ambiguous wording “new model” really means allowing widespread theft from innovators.
For now, the WHO focuses third-world assistance on mRNA vaccines — both assuming, as any central planner would, that the next big crisis will be just like the last one and ignoring the extraordinary inefficiencies, difficulties and costs of building less-developed country capacity in mRNA vaccines. This is from the same public authorities who were so busy selling the imminence of a climate crisis that they missed out on the obvious risks of a viral pandemic.
***TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE, VISIT THE FINANCIAL POST HERE***
