Part 4: The WHO’s Activist Army in the Attack on Industry
How More NGO Funding and Empowerment Won’t Improve Public Health
The WHO recently produced a report calling to extend their tobacconization strategy (of isolating and excluding all “health-harming industries” (HHIs) from policy or public engagement). Part 1 of this analysis looked at how the WHO extended the definition of HHIs to include almost every commercial business. The second part showed how the WHO’s attempt to dismantle stakeholder dialogue would make policymaking unworkable. The last section showed the WHO’s unfair and unreasonable attacks on corporate social responsibility, the cornerstone being industry’s stakeholder engagement.
But the report, entitled “Commercial determinants of noncommunicable diseases in the WHO European Region”, also proposed an alternative to policymaking in their post-industrial, post-corporate age. This section will examine how and why the WHO is demanding more involvement and more funding for NGOs and civil society organizations (CSOs) in the policy process.
The logic put forward by the WHO is simple. Industry has a profit motive so anything they have to bring into the policy process, into the public sphere, is determined by that commercial interest. They assume that industry actors will lie, manipulate and allow increased health suffering in order to advance their interests. Contrasting that, civil society organizations (CSOs) and NGOs do not have such interests (by definition, they are non-profits).
The WHO report defines CSOs as “… nongovernmental organizations and advocacy groups along with community-based organizations, including patients, health-care workers, and marginalized and vulnerable population groups.” These groups are best placed to take over the public engagement and policy process since they do “advocacy” work rather than “lobbying” (same difference).
But are these groups free from interests? Does money not play a role in their decisions and operations? The WHO should know better. Part 2 of this series noted how more than 80% of the WHO’s funding comes from foundations and earmarked for certain programs so they must know that funding always comes with strings… strings that can choke rationality.
Non-profits = Non-interests?
The WHO is working from the model that CSOs don’t make money, so by the process of simple elimination, they have the interests of individuals and public health at their core (unlike industry groups). The days of donation urns and clipboard volunteers on street corners are well past. Today a CSO or NGO is a large, sophisticated organization, globally networked and financially enabled by foundations, government programs, large donors and interest groups from law firms to industries benefitting from their “advocacy work”.
The Firebreak has been investigating how foundations (via dark, donor-advised funds) are taking a more active role in policy debates via these CSOs. Funding in many cases are in the hundreds of millions so the question the WHO should have considered is whether these groups are not also captured by financial interests.
The WHO should have followed the money:
Directors from WWF and Friends of the Earth set up a non-profit in 2014 called the Baltic Sea Conservation Society funded by the Russian oil giant, Gazprom, to “advocate” for their Nord Stream gas pipeline projects, while at the same time continuing their campaigns against nuclear energy (in the face of rising CO2 emissions and climate concerns).
After three decades of campaigns against plant genetic modification (GMOs), a group of German activists admitted their campaign had been lost on scientific and agricultural bases. But in an internal document, with continued funding from the organic food industry lobby, they were determined to continue campaigning on a political, anti-industry strategy.
Campaigns linking herbicide use to cancers, birth defects and Parkinson’s have been relentlessly funded by US tort law firms to help support their litigation strategy against pesticide producers despite no government research regulatory agencies supporting their claims. With billions of dollars in settlements, these interest groups are also funding research with questionable methodologies and ethics to try to manufacture evidence for the courtroom. Much of this strategy is centered around the Ramazzini Institute (a type of Rotary Club for activist scientists based in Italy) who have maintained very close interaction with the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a WHO agency.
Can the WHO seriously claim that these groups do not have interests and that money is not influencing their decisions? Or is it more of a case that these CSOs are their useful idiots, easily funded and available to support WHO strategies without fail?
The WHO is calling for more public funding of CSOs as an alternative to industry involvement in the policy process. But they do not provide any outline of how it would be distributed, to whom and how much. With billions floating around the CSO world from foundations, tort law firms and other interest groups, and the noise and uncertainty they are already creating, how would further public funds be an improvement?
Manufacturers of … PowerPoints
NGOs and CSOs make PowerPoints, not vaccines or other health-promoting products, processes or systems. They excel at making networks and coalitions to put forward ideologically purified concepts (eg, having policies determined with no industry involvement) but if there were ever a time where they would have to rely on converting theory into practice, these groups would falter at the first hurdle.
The people running these activist shows rarely have scientific backgrounds. They come from the political/consulting world, often having worked in large foundations before. Their experience is securing funding and distributing it into programs that then form umbrella groups that have meetings (hence the PowerPoints). Within these umbrella groups there might be a professor who founded a lab now managed by several post-docs on short-term funding or a dedicated survivor who set up a patients group for some remote disease.
Funding is provided within what is called framework programs (often from foundations, the WHO, or government agencies) built around a proposal answering a call with a series of work packages and deliverables spread out over a three to five-year period. The proposals may be evaluated on the quality of the consortium network, project management and, to a lesser extent, budget. There is little evaluation or expectation on impact or if the consortium makes anything that will provide public health improvements. The partners meet every three to six months at a consortium partner’s host location (usually with some nice dinners and an organized event) and after three years and enough documents have been produced by interns, they pitch for a new framework call.
This is what WHO officials busy themselves with. They fund and meet the project coordinators regularly (many are former colleagues) and they share the reports and data at conferences (more PowerPoints).
This WHO industry exclusion report, based on gathering case studies to justify excluding industry from the stakeholder dialogue process, likely developed from such a framework program. The coordinator brought together a consortium of anti-industry activists and they all agreed with each other over a series of meetings (and PowerPoints).
But in this process, that includes ex-post evaluations, not a single life is saved, no public health innovations are developed to improve the quality of life and no products put on markets. An example:
Many academics have a theory that traditional (peasant) agricultural practices are more sustainable than the innovations that have increased yields in conventional agriculture. This fits their political ideology that industrialization and capitalism has created a worse situation for humans and the environment. Working with NGOs like Via Campesina, they procure funding to set up agroecological projects (usually in impoverished agricultural villages). For three years, they take public or foundation funding to set up an agroecological cooperative in a small hamlet, go there to see the progress, maybe set up a seed bank, and then write reports nobody reads on how successful agroecology is. Those reports do not contain evidence of what happens to the village or the seed bank once the project funding ends and the circus ups stakes and moves to the next town. But these academics go to UN conferences (with NGOs from countless other agroecology projects), share their success stories and take the opportunity to show why industrial agriculture had failed that village beforehand.
From Public-Private Partnerships to the Nanny State
An early WHO Director-General, Gro Harlem Brundtland, believed in promoting global public health via public-private partnerships. GAVI, the global vaccine alliance, claims as its mission that it “combines the technical expertise of the development community with the business know-how of the private sector”. The NCD Alliance, who have strong positions against tobacco and alcohol industry lobbying, receives funding from eight corporations that the present WHO consider as health-harming industries.
It can be assumed that these organizations will have to stop receiving funding from or interacting with their industry members should this WHO anti-industry strategy document becomes official policy. How will this have a positive value for the promotion of public health?
I don’t think the WHO cares what happens to NGOs who have embraced stakeholder dialogue. There is something more sinister going on behind the curtain. The WHO does not trust that individuals can manage their personal health decisions and they have embraced the Nanny State model. The report writes:
“Shifting the public health narrative away from focusing solely on individual responsibility in NCD prevention and control, including from CSOs, is key. Instead, citizens and CSOs could advocate and hold governments and commercial actors accountable for the protection and promotion of environments, public policies and a political economic system that are conducive to good health, addressing the systemic issues that underline NCDs.”
In other words, the WHO is recommending that a group of their appointed activist groups will determine a population’s lifestyle choices and personal health decisions. And they require more taxpayer funding to enforce their ideologies and restrict populations from the freedom to enjoy life’s pleasures.
How far will their restrictions go? These are health zealots demanding zero risks (and with no dialogue process any longer in place).
Is this Worse than Industry?
Is industry really that horrible that the only alternative the WHO is proposing is to take away individual liberties and let a group of ideologues determine personal decisions? Far from it.
Industry research is based on innovating to solve problems. These solutions of course have anticipated financial benefits that should exceed the invested research costs, but more importantly, for regulators, is the question of whether these solutions benefit human health and the environment? Are these companies producing medicines to treat pain with fewer side effects, foods that provide energy with better calorie content or packaging products that protect food quality and reduce waste? Are they reducing harm to human health and the environment compared to existing products?
For governments to effectively regulate on health and environment policies, they need to consult and cooperate with the innovators of these solutions rather than arbitrarily restricting themselves to a group of agitating activists funded by dark, wealthy interest groups to demand an idealistic zero-risk world.
In short, the activist alternative the WHO is promoting is a waste of money, a waste of time and a waste of intellectual resources. It intends to deny the fundamental right of individual choice to achieve its ends.