The WHO’s War on Industry
The WHO’s War on Industry
Led by emotion and vengeance, the WHO is costing lives
Around a decade ago, I learnt the expression: The Denormalization of Industry. The idea of ostracizing the business community from social acceptance and societal norms did not come from any anti-capitalist academic, radical activist group or far-left political party. I learnt about it from a WHO COP document.
The World Health Organization (WHO), as a UN organization, is meant to represent the global health community but in the last two decades, its management has come largely from the NGO health activist community, its priorities have been tied to the Global South and its focus has shifted more to non-communicable diseases (illnesses often stemming from lifestyle and consumption practices). In this shift, the WHO has become increasingly anti-industry in its policies and communications to the point where UN officials now seem to see their role as a foil to combat the role of corporations on human health issues.
Across all sectors today, the WHO is waging war on Western industries.
The WHO’s War on Nicotine
Tobacco kills. No one is denying that. And tobacco marketing campaigns in the 1970s and 80s were indeed lamentable. After the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement in the US, several things changed: a large amount of funding has been provided for anti-tobacco NGO awareness campaigns and the remaining large tobacco companies have shifted into producing less-harm nicotine products like e-cigarettes. Providing smokers with the means to receive nicotine without the harmful effects of burning tobacco has been a major health advance that is already showing up in mortality statistics. Vaping in particular has proven to be a successful smoking cessation product. Anecdotally, my wife, a happy smoker for over 40 years, was able to stop via the shift to e-cigarettes and is much healthier because of it so this is personal to me.
But with all of this settlement money floating around for anti-industry NGOs, a dramatic decline in tobacco use in the West and the presence of Big Tobacco companies in the e-cigarette market, the activist community has been triggered into shifting their fight to a war on vaping. Leading this charge, once again, is the WHO. In 2014, when vaping use was growing, a report on e-cigarettes was presented at the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) COP6 meeting. Their position did not seriously consider the health advantages compared to tobacco combustibles but on how promoting vaping would undermine the success in “denormalizing” smoking and the tobacco industry.
I get that certain health activists are driven by grudges, some lasting decades. But their vengeful attacks on alternative nicotine products is not only irrational, it could allow tobacco product use to increase again. WHO leaders need to think more scientifically and less emotionally.
Things got even nastier when, during the pandemic, the WHO blocked the Emergency Use Listing for the Medicago novel COVID-19 vaccine, Covifenz. Their reason was brutally simple: Philip Morris was 25% owner of the company (the vaccine was derived from a plant related to tobacco plants). It did not matter that the Canadian government had invested millions in the project, had approved the vaccine that did not need expensive cold storage and that the developing world was desperate for such a solution … the tobacco industry could not be tolerated in any way. The WHO essentially shut Medicago down, killing with it the research that hoped to use this plant-based technology to produce a variety of vaccines faster and cheaper.
Zealots don’t care how many others die for their principles.
The WHO’s War on Food
Food is a broad area and the WHO has taken positions against the food industry from its support for IARC’s interventionist monograph on aspartame when it fell under JECFA’s competence (and despite pleas by WHO member states, Japan and the US, to stand down). WHO positions against food marketing practices and promoting agroecology are indicative of how this UN organization pits itself against the food industry.
But nowhere has the WHO been more obsessed than in its war on infant nutritional products. While not trying to defend some of the actions of the infant formula marketing campaigns in developing countries in the 1970s, the WHO’s attempt to exclude and denormalize infant nutrition companies has resulted today in an unforgiveable infant mortality toll.
It is no longer about breastfeeding versus baby formula, but on ensuring that parents of older infants receive the proper information when weaning their children. With 45% of deaths of children under the age of five attributed to poor nutrition (UN data), the WHO, in blocking support for these food companies, has created confusion with devastating consequences.
Stewart Forsythe, in his excellent book, The Wasted Years, shows how the WHO’s exclusion of the infant food nutrition companies has led to an increased loss of life. On an issue where stakeholders need to “collaborate in the development of policies and practices”, for several decades “the policy-making process has been a theatre of conflict with acrimony and division now deeply embedded between stakeholders”. All of this would stop if the WHO just sucked it up, stopped their four-decade long witch-hunt and, at the very least, invited nutrition industry researchers to their meetings.
The WHO’s War on Pharmaceuticals
Who could ever forget former WHO General Secretary, Margaret Chan’s 2014 outburst on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry during the time of an Ebola outbreak in Western Africa. She charged them with only being concerned with profits to treat western diseases while sitting back to watch thousands die from Ebola. Of course prior to 2014, only a few hundred had died from this virus and developing a vaccine to treat an emerging pandemic would take time, but Chan used her bully pulpit to hide the woeful incompetence of her own administration that allowed the virus to spread unabated.
Within the WHO is the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) bringing together, supposedly, the greatest minds in cancer research. Pharmaceutical companies have invested heavily in finding a cure for cancer, fund the largest research centers and make the largest impact in the fight against cancer. Wouldn’t it be odd then that for IARC’s 50th anniversary conference, not a single research scientist from the pharmaceutical industry was invited to Lyon to speak, network and learn. Here is the list of over 700 cancer research attendees - not one cancer researcher from industry labs. IARC’s history has been pockmarked with attacks on industries, perhaps most notably their anti-Monsanto activism following their manufactured glyphosate monograph.
The WHO’s War on Climate
The COP28 Climate Summit in Dubai offered, for the first time, a day dedicated to climate change and health, and the WHO, on this day, showed its true colors, delivering not only a tirade against industry, but an appeal to denormalize the fossil fuel industry.
At COP28 a group of international health organizations tied to the WHO called for the exclusion of the fossil fuel industry from the climate discussions (in the same way the WHO banned tobacco companies from attending the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control). In an interview with Politico, the WHO climate lead, Maria Neira, echoed her members’ call, expressing the need to change the UNFCCC COP process to ensure that such fossil fuel lobbyists would not have a “seat at the table”.
Pitchforks are at hand.
The WHO has become a representative voice for activists campaigning against industry. This is ironic since the innovative solutions industry has provided over the last 50 years has provided for the greatest period of health improvement, human longevity advancement and disease eradication in the history of humanity. This is not because of the WHO, it is despite them.
That the WHO has consistently attempted to denormalize and isolate the companies that provide the solutions that have advanced human health is lamentable. And let’s not forget that the COVID-19 pandemic was put behind us thanks to the pharmaceutical industry’s rapid development of a series of vaccines, and definitely not because of the confused and inconsistent work of the WHO.
But the WHO war on industry is costing lives, lost opportunities and misleading messages on important health issues.
Perhaps we should denormalize the WHO…