OPINION:
It is becoming increasingly clear that the World Health Organization has lost the plot about health and common sense.
In a move that most people would find puzzling, at the 76th World Health Assembly at the end of May, North Korea was elected to the WHO’s executive board. It is difficult to fathom why Kim Jong Un’s global pariah has been welcomed with open arms by an executive body that decides approaches to health care and public health policies worldwide.
In his acceptance speech, the North Korean representative promptly used his country’s new elevated platform to criticize the United States for having “the worst human rights record” because of its sanctions on Mr. Kim’s dictatorial regime.
In another tone-deaf diplomatic move by the WHO, its director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, met with Russian Deputy Health Minister Oleg Salagay on May 29 to discuss “Russia’s work to advance maternal and child health.”
Considering Russia has been bombing hospitals and maternity units in Ukraine while stealing children from their parents there, the head of the WHO praising Russia for its child-friendly health policies is beyond parody.
The WHO has not entirely forgotten Ukraine, though. To coincide with World No Tobacco Day on May 31, the WHO released a report praising the Ukrainian government for not letting a war divert it from banning flavored vaping liquids. This is reminiscent of 2016 when the WHO urged officials in Islamic State-ravaged Syria to implement plain packaging of cigarettes “notwithstanding the current crisis in the country.”
Mr. Tedros was elected unopposed in May last year for a second five-year term despite a string of errors under his watch. The global health agency drew widespread ridicule when the director-general installed the brutal Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe as a goodwill ambassador, and it has more recently been heavily criticized for kowtowing to the Chinese government.
It is widely recognized that the WHO failed miserably to deal with the COVID-19 outbreak. Despite reports of the virus escaping from China, it was not until mid-March 2020 that the WHO finally conceded that widespread community transmission was occurring and declared a pandemic.
Instead, in January 2020, as it was clear that countries other than China were reporting COVID-19 cases, the WHO spent its time publishing a series of 14 tweets about the dangers of vaping, including claims such as e-cigarette liquid being highly inflammable and that secondhand vapor is lethal to bystanders, both of which are false.
It is not even the first time that the WHO has got its priorities all wrong when it comes to deadly diseases. In 2014, the previous director-general, Margaret Chan, ducked a conference to discuss the fast-growing outbreak of Ebola in Africa and instead flew to Moscow — just months after Russia had shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine — to have tea with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and make a speech, implying that banning e-cigarettes is a more important use of her time.
Also under Mrs. Chan’s charge, Dr. Vera Luiza da Costa e Silva, then head of the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control Secretariat, congratulated the brutal Philippine then-President Rodrigo Duterte for his smoke-free policies, conveniently ignoring that he personally encouraged up to 20,000 extrajudicial murders of drug users.
Mrs. Chan also presided over a global meeting held in Turkmenistan, presumably as a reward for its dictator, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, having severely restricted cigarette sales in 2016. Human Rights Watch describes Turkmenistan as “one of the world’s most oppressive and closed countries” which bans religion, tortures political prisoners, and boasts “one of the world’s worst media freedom records.”
Turkmenistan also claims not to have experienced a single COVID-19 case and threatens people who refuse vaccination with imprisonment for up to two years. Still, none of this deterred the WHO from giving Turkmenistan an award last year for its efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mr. Tedros is engaged in supporting his organization’s crusade against alternative nicotine products, which are helping people who smoke to quit in their millions worldwide. A WHO meeting in November this year is being set up to treat vaping and other reduced-risk products the same as lethal combustible tobacco, on the basis of junk science and misinformation.
For a global health organization that must necessarily negotiate political realities, it is surprising that the WHO appears to have no political antenna and supports some of the worst governments in the world while peddling policies contrary to public health. The U.S. is the largest contributor to WHO funding, something which should be reevaluated if the organization continues to act like a banana republic rather than a respectable global institution.
• Martin Cullip is an international fellow at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance’s Consumer Center and is based in London.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.