My article for The Telegraph on the World Health Organization and the need for urgent reform.
Broader coverage is here: UK in race to opt out of WHO lockdown powers
The WHO has not just lost its way – it has been captured
The World Health Organisation was born from a noble ambition – one of those post-war visions of multilateralism, designed to harness shared human ingenuity in the pursuit of peace and prosperity.
It was the child of a world freshly scarred by fascism and war, seeking salvation in co-operation.
At its zenith, it played a critical role in vanquishing smallpox, advancing child immunisation, and extending life expectancy across continents. Today, however, it resembles not a guardian of global health but a ghost ship – rudderless, bloated and dangerously compromised.
To say this softly is to betray the truth. The WHO has not merely lost its way. It has been captured – politically, ideologically, and financially. It dances to the tune of those who pay its piper – notably the Chinese Communist Party and, increasingly, a pharmaceutical-industrial complex with little interest in transparency and even less in accountability.
The rot, though long in the making, was laid bare for all to see during the Covid pandemic.
When the first whispers of a strange new virus emerged from Wuhan, the WHO did not act with the urgency or independence one might expect from a guardian of the world’s health. It repeated Chinese propaganda about there being “no evidence of human-to-human transmission” well into January 2020, even as Taiwanese authorities had already sounded the alarm.
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general – who owes his appointment in part to Beijing’s backing – praised China’s “transparency”, while Chinese authorities detained whistleblower doctors, scrubbed data from labs and delayed international investigations.
‘This is not science – it is theatre’
The Wuhan lab leak theory, once dismissed as conspiracy, is now considered plausible by the FBI, the US Department of Energy, and numerous respected virologists.
Yet the WHO’s long-delayed investigation into Covid’s origins was essentially choreographed by the Chinese state. Peter Ben Embarek, who led the probe, later admitted on Danish television that Chinese officials pressured the team to avoid discussing the lab leak theory altogether. This is not science – it is theatre.
Meanwhile, the WHO’s proposed amendments to its international health regulations and its forthcoming pandemic treaty present the most serious threat to national sovereignty in a generation.
Buried within these legal frameworks are proposals that would allow unelected WHO officials to declare public health emergencies and issue recommendations – including on lockdowns, border closures and vaccine requirements.
Imagine that for a moment: decisions made in Geneva influence whether your child can go to school in Glasgow, or whether an elderly parent in Leeds can leave their care home.
The WHO insists these measures are necessary to ensure global preparedness. But the question is preparedness for what – and on whose terms? It is not difficult to imagine a future crisis – real or perceived – where political interests masquerade as public health, especially in an age where digital censorship and ideological capture are increasingly normalised.
This Government, alas, seems content to cheer this along. Labour’s foreign policy increasingly reads like an outsourced extension of Davos and Geneva – a world-view in which nation-states are old-fashioned irritants and China is treated less as a hostile actor and more as a misunderstood trading partner.
Consider the Chagos Islands fiasco, where the Government appears willing to concede sovereignty over British territory, ignoring not only legal precedent but the will of the islanders themselves.
Or note how little protest is raised against China’s ongoing campaign of economic disruption in our steel towns like Scunthorpe, offering state-subsidised overproduction to collapse prices and eliminate competition. This is not strategy – it is surrender, and it should alarm us all.
Consider the funding structure of the WHO itself. In 2020, only 17 per cent of its budget came from assessed contributions by member states.
In practice, this means that a health body founded to serve the world’s poorest is now increasingly serving its richest and most powerful – those with the deepest pockets and the greatest interest in shaping global norms. Big pharma profits soared during the pandemic.
Pfizer’s revenue jumped from $41 billion in 2020 to over $100 billion in 2022, largely off the back of taxpayer-funded vaccine development and government mandates, and all under the approving gaze of the WHO.
Usurpation of democratic rights
What the British public sees – what they intuit – is not just bureaucratic overreach but a creeping usurpation of their democratic rights. They voted to leave the European Union precisely because they were tired of decisions being made by people they could not name and could not remove. The WHO, as it currently stands, is another iteration of the same problem.
Reform is essential, but it must be more than cosmetic. The WHO must be stripped of its ideological pretensions and restored to its founding mission – to be a servant of global health, not an arbiter of political orthodoxy. Commercial influence must be exorcised.
Authoritarian regimes must be held at arm’s length. And local decision-makers, those closest to the people, must be empowered, not overridden.
If such reform proves impossible, then withdrawal must be considered not as retreat, but as leadership. Britain has often led when others dithered. We could do so again – working with democratic allies like the US, Canada, and Australia to forge a leaner, more transparent health coalition. One that shares data freely, responds rapidly to crises, and respects national sovereignty.
In the end, the question is simple. Who governs Britain? If the answer is not “the British people, through their elected representatives”, then we have lost more than a debate over global health. We have lost our freedom.
Suella
