In a ‘Call to Action’ published on 17 May, the Pan-European Commission on Climate and Health, a body convened by WHO Europe, urged governments to formally have WHO declare climate change a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (“PHEIC,” pronounced “FAKE”).
The climate-health linkage is only the latest iteration of this age-old pattern of authoritarians who claim expert knowledge to order people’s lives onto the road to serfdom, Tilak Doshi writes.
Former Dutch Health Minister Ernst Kuipers, in his capacity as a member of the World Health Organisation’s Pan-European Commission on Climate and Health, declared last week: “The impact of climate change is enormous … so enormous that there is really no escaping it.” This statement, highlighted in a hard-hitting analysis published on Saturday by Marcel Crok of the Climate Intelligence (CLINTEL) network, perfectly captures the rhetorical strategy now being deployed by WHO.
The WHO and aligned outlets like the Lancet are once again framing climate change as an “international public health emergency,” complete with dire warnings about heat-related deaths, extreme weather and the spread of infectious diseases. Yet, as Crok meticulously documents, these claims amount to “shameless climate propaganda” that conveniently ignores readily available data showing dramatic declines in weather-related mortality and vastly greater deaths from cold than from heat.
The timing is telling. Even as the IPCC has quietly moved away from its most extreme RCP8.5 scenario in preparations for its Seventh Assessment Report, the health scare machine is being cranked up to full volume.
H.L. Mencken, that most astute observer of the democratic follies of his age, famously remarked that the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed – and hence clamorous to be led to safety – by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. One wonders what Mencken would have made of the World Health Organisation in 2026, an institution that has perfected the art of the hobgoblin to a degree that would have made even the most brazen 20th century propagandist blush.
Dr. Vanessa Kerry – daughter of John Kerry, the Biden administration’s special climate envoy – was appointed as the first-ever Special Envoy for Climate Change and Health for WHO in June 2023. In her keynote address to the first-ever day dedicated to health at a UN climate conference (COP), Dr. Kerry claimed “the climate crisis is a health crisis. And it’s killing us.”
In December 2024, WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus testified before the International Court of Justice that climate change is “fundamentally a health crisis” that is already “wreaking havoc” on human health and overwhelming healthcare systems worldwide. WHO’s own fact sheet on climate change and health opens by declaring that climate change is “directly contributing to humanitarian emergencies from heatwaves, wildfires, floods, tropical storms and hurricanes.”
No comments:
Post a Comment