On 8 May, Malcolm Roberts discussed the latest abortive effort by the UN system to promote ‘sexuality education’ from birth. Yes, really. The origins of this go back to the document Standards for Sexuality Education in Europe funded by Germany’s health ministry and published jointly with the WHO Collaborating Centre in Europe in 2010. In 2023 the effort to universalise these Euro-origin standards faltered in the UN Commission on Population and Development. The EU and ‘progressive’ Western countries’ (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Canada) push to foist the woke agenda on the rest of the world failed due to resistance from non-Western countries like Iran, Pakistan, Nigeria and the Holy See.

Dr David Bell explains how last year WHO’s abortion-care guidance called for babies to ‘be killed up until the moment they emerge from the birth canal, without delay, whenever a pregnant woman requests it’. It recommends abortions be available on request and advises against ‘gestational age limits’. This is both a bureaucratic and a moral overreach. Only the governments concerned have the right and responsibility to make decisions on policy parameters between pro-choice and pro-life advocates. How can an organisation that spouts such anti-empirical rubbish as ‘women, girls or other pregnant persons’ be accepted as an authority on science, biology, medicine or public health? The WHO has become just another vehicle for cultural imperialism of the Euro-US woke agenda.

The WHO has also determined that alcohol is dangerous for your health, regardless of how little or rarely you imbibe. If you believe you drink responsibly, you are just the alcohol industry’s useful idiot. The WHO says alcohol accounts for 5.1 per cent of the world’s disease burden and ‘contributes to 3 million deaths each year globally’. A WHO news release in January insisted that ‘no level of alcohol consumption is safe for health’. Over the last three years we have been conditioned to accept that public health safety trumps all other values and considerations, including such quaint old-fashioned notions as liberty, free choice and individual responsibility for one’s health and lifestyle choices. On 15 April, in the latest iteration of its role as the world’s nanny, the WHO published Reporting about Alcohol: A Guide for Journalists attacking the notion of ‘responsible drinking’ as ‘a marketing tool and a tactic to influence public beliefs about the alcohol industry’ that neither tells us when to stop nor acknowledges the option of abstinence. It also allegedly ‘ignores the inherent risks in consuming alcohol, mischaracterising its harms as the result of a small minority of individual drinkers who cannot control their intake’. It stigmatises those who cannot hold their drink by putting ‘the entirety of the blame for alcohol problems on individual drinkers rather than more prominent… factors such as advertising, pricing or availability’.

Thus three key elements of the successful weaponisation of Covid for ensuring compliance with Science™ diktats from the WHO – scaremongering, shaming, and controlling the media narrative – are being replicated to socially engineer human behaviour on drinking, behaviour that is as old as human civilisation.

The WHO-backed package of measures to fight Covid damaged health, children’s immunisation programs in developing countries, mental health, food security, economies, poverty reduction, and educational and social wellbeing of peoples. Unicef’s State of the World’s Children 2023 report last month documented that lockdown-induced disruptions to healthcare resulted in 67 million fewer childhood immunisations, reversing in three years, ‘more than a decade of progress’. Their worst effect was grievous assaults on human rights, civil liberties, individual autonomy and bodily integrity. In promoting these policies the WHO violated the guidance from its own report in 2019 that summarised a century’s worth of worldwide experience and science, and also its own constitution which defines health as ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’. The vaccine push similarly ignored accumulating safety signals about the scale of adverse reactions, on the one hand, and rapidly dwindling effectiveness of successive doses, on the other.

Whisper it softly for fear of being cancelled, but does the WHO understand the difference between enjoying life to the full and merely existing on life-support? Going by its woeful record on Covid, the answer is: No, it does not. Yet, this is the body that wants to expand and entrench its powers to dictate our lives, as I discussed last June.

The bureaucratic nature of the WHO shows in the preamble to the draft pandemic treaty: 49 articles over five pages. The current draft of the treaty uses language beloved of technocrats: ‘synergies between multisectoral collaboration – through whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches at the country and community level – and international, regional and cross-regional collaboration, coordination and global solidarity, and their importance to achieving sustainable improvements’. The progressive elements of the treaty include ritualistic obeisance to inclusiveness, solidarity, transparency, accountability, ‘the importance of diverse, gender-balanced and equitable representation and expertise’, ‘the determination to achieve health equity through resolute action on social, environmental, cultural, political and economic determinants of health, such as eradicating hunger and poverty, ensuring access to health and proper food, safe drinking water and sanitation, employment and decent work and social protection in a comprehensive intersectoral approach’. The treaty also makes several references to environmental and cultural factors. A research brief from the Australian Academy of Science in August 2020 concluded: ‘males with Covid-19 are more likely to be hospitalised, more likely to be admitted to an ICU and more likely to die’. According to data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (28 April), of the 13,456 people whose underlying cause of death was Covid-19, 7,439 were men and 6,017 women. According to World-ometers, in China the Covid case fatality rates for males was 2.8 per cent compared to 1.7 per cent for females. According to the CDC, 55 per cent of US Covid deaths were males. Yet, the WHO says Covid has a worse impact on women.

The last three years have amounted to a bureaucratic coup against elected governments. Now the WHO is engaged in a silent coup against the governments of the world. If it succeeds, an organisation set up to serve governments will boss it over them instead and compel their taxpayers to pay for the privilege. It is a basic axiom of politics that power once seized is seldom surrendered back voluntarily to the people. The corollary holds that power that can be abused, will be abused.