The Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme, which helps those left disabled after having a vaccine and families of those who died, is to be reviewed after a massive rise in claims following the Covid jab rollout. The Mail has more.
Health Secretary Victoria Atkins has asked officials in her department to look at how the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme (VDPS) could be reformed.
It comes amid concerns that it is struggling to cope following a huge number of claims from those suffering from side-effects after having the COVID-19 jab.
Claims rose to 4,008 last year – up from 480 in 2022, [48 in 2021], 26 in 2020 and 27 in 2019, official figures show. Separate data reveals that up to April 26th this year, 11,022 claims were made to the scheme in connection with Covid jabs.
It is not a compensation scheme but is intended to “ease the present and future burdens of those suffering from severe vaccine damage, and their families”. Victims and families are still entitled to sue for compensation.
Financing the scheme has risen from £600,000 in 2021-22 to £16.1 million in 2023-24. Its one-off £120,000 payment has not risen in line with inflation since 2007. Minister Esther McVey is understood to be among those calling for reforms to the scheme.
Stop Press: Scientists from Oxford, Cambridge and Caltech have created a jab to “help protect against multiple coronaviruses”, including the ones “we don’t even know about yet”.
Results from a large online survey of adults in France find that, despite the large uptake in mRNA COVID-19 vaccines in France (93%), uncertainty about them still exists within a majority of the French population. This hesitancy isn’t simply restricted to a few ‘anti-vaxxers’ but concerns about long-term safety of mRNA vaccines exist amongst the general population and are a big factor in vaccine hesitancy. In their conclusion, based on the survey, the authors suggest that “public health experts and decision-makers should abandon their tendency to label all forms of doubts about scientific consensus and beliefs that run counter to it as a rejection of science itself”.
The COVID-19 pandemic enabled mRNA vaccines to be used on a large proportion of the population (in France the uptake rate was 93% with similarly high uptake rates in many other countries), showcasing their potential to combat infectious diseases, including cancer. However, the survey found that only a small majority of the participants (51%) supported the idea that “Messenger RNA is a promising technology for tomorrow’s medicine”, despite the high uptake in the country.
Only 15% of survey respondents strongly agreed with the view that “In the event of a new epidemic, mRNA vaccines will be useful” with 31% agreeing, 35% don’t know, 10% disagreeing and 9% strongly disagreeing. Similarly, there was no strong consensus that it was “Thanks to the mRNA vaccines that the COVID-19 epidemic was bought under control”, with 11% strongly agreeing with this statement while 14% strongly disagreed with the statement; as for most of the questions, the don’t knows were the largest group (32%).
A question about the long-term side-effects of mRNA vaccines was the only question where a clear majority of respondents supported the statement posed, with 62% of respondents agreeing with the statement that “There is still a lot we don’t know about the long-term effects of messenger RNA vaccines”. Among these respondents, 15% were unvaccinated, 50% had doubts despite vaccination and 35% were vaccinated and comfortable with it. Notably, 78% of these respondents supported vaccination overall and trusted science and doctors, similar to the general population. However, they exhibited lower confidence in Government, health agencies and the pharmaceutical industry. This group, representing nearly two-thirds of the French population, displayed scepticism towards political and economic influences on science during the pandemic.
Those expressing doubts were not categorically anti-vaccine but questioned aspects of the technology and governance surrounding it. Such scepticism doesn’t inherently reject science but reflects public unease navigating science’s intersection with politics and economics. Labelling dissenting views as ‘anti-science’ oversimplifies complex dynamics. Policy responses should move beyond information dissemination, addressing systemic issues and integrating diverse perspectives to foster trust and informed decision-making in public health.
Dr. Maggie Cooper is a pharmacist and research scientist.
The sober Daily Telegraph of old would have blushed to print Monday’s half-page of purple prose, describing a three-year loan of gold artefacts from the V&A and British Museum to the ceremonial King of Asante in Ghana.
In an earlier, more traditional report online on Sunday the same reporter wrote that rather than handing back in 2027 the relics now on loan to his private museum, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II’s spokesmen say he’d prefer to keep them, thanks. Scarcely a surprise to most observers, of course, though a brief delay might have been more tactful?
The only surprise is that the Telegraph employs this particular reporter to burn up air miles soliciting quotes from museum directors or passed-over potentates (in among others Benin, Jamaica and Ghana) demanding artefacts which have been safely housed and displayed to the world in the British Museum for over a century. Surely, his editor knows the vast majority of readers disdain this activist propagandising, which belongs in the Guardian if anywhere?
Time for some facts. Responding on January 26th to a report by the Museums Association on the Ghana loan, J. Michael Phillips wrote:
This article shows a staggering ignorance of the facts. In 1873 the Ashanti army, about 12,000 strong, crossed the River Pra (the boundary agreed with the Ashantis in the 1831 Treaty) into the British Colony of the Gold Coast and set about laying it waste. This formed no part of the Ashanti kingdom and was inhabited by the Fanti people.
A military expedition to prevent further Ashanti incursions was mounted under General Wolseley. Attempts to repel the Ashantis with local levies failed, so troops had to be sent out from England. Wolseley had 4,000 troops, so was outnumbered by three to one. Battles ensued at Amoaful (January 31st 1874) and Ordahsu (February 4th 1874). On arrival at Coomassie (Kumasi) it found the King and the Ashanti army had abandoned it. The soldiers found clear evidence of human sacrifice, with thousands of skulls piled up in a sacred grove.
There was significant plundering on the first night by the released Fanti prisoners and camp followers, to halt which the captain commanding the military police had one looter hanged and others flogged, but much disappeared that night. The valuables discovered on the following day were collected up by the Prize Agents and auctioned off at Cape Coast, realising about £5,000. The Ashanti signed the Treaty of Fomena in July 1874 to end the war. Among articles of the Treaty was an undertaking by the Ashantis to end human sacrifice.
This was not a colonial war: Ashanti territory was not annexed until 1901, and in January 1902 Britain designated the Ashanti Kingdom as a protectorate. By then 25 years had passed since the items now to be ‘returned on loan’ had been removed from a former enemy. Although Ghana is now a Member of the Commonwealth and a former Colony, Ashantiland was at the time of the Ashanti Campaign of 1873-74 a hostile state.
And then there’s the disgusting story of the Governor’s skull, a golden relic which was tactfully not mentioned at last weekend’s ceremony. In an earlier conflict with invading Asante, on January 21st 1824, Brig-Gen Sir Charles McCarthy’s small column had run out of ammunition in the face of 10,000 Asante warriors.
Almost all the British force [of 500] were killed immediately while 20 managed to escape. MacCarthy, Ensign Wetherell, and his secretary Williams attempted to fall back. MacCarthy was wounded by gunfire however, and killed by a second shot shortly thereafter. Ensign Wetherell was killed while defending MacCarthy’s body. Williams was…. held prisoner for several months in a hut which also held the severed heads of MacCarthy and Wetherell. MacCarthy’s skull was rimmed with gold and… was used as a drinking cup by Ashanti rulers.
Another account says MacCarthy’s skull was cast in solid gold and continued to be used as a ceremonial drinking vessel. Thankfully the original was recovered in 1829 and given decent burial in St. Saviour’s Church, Dartmouth. The 1874 expedition recovered, in addition to golden artefacts now loaned by the crumple-suited British Museum Director Tristram Hunt, some silver forks looted from MacCarthy’s baggage in the Asante’s 1824 colonising war against their peaceful Fanti neighbours on the Gold Coast.
The BBC’s report of the Asante loan ends with customary BBC disinformation, saying “In 2022 Germany gave back over 1,000 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria”. Not true: Green politicians, as part of a massive art-for-oil deal, announced their intent to send 1,130 pieces from German museums to Nigeria. But it’s the German Länder (states) that control their own museums, not central Government. No sooner had a couple of dozen pieces been returned, than the Nigerian President decreed that all such restitutions will be handed to a private citizen, the Oba of Benin – as I reported in earlier Daily Sceptic articles,
New research by German author Andreas Roth has confirmed that the Länder of Saxony (283 pieces in Dresden’s two museums) and Bavaria (116 pieces in two museums in Munich) have not signed, concerned to learn that the Nigerian people will neither see nor benefit from the returned artworks. So if they do hold out, over a third of Germany’s national collection of these unique artworks will be saved for future generations to study and admire. Meantime, London’s Horniman Museum has a three-year extension on all but six of the 72 bronze and ivory pieces it gave away in 2022 and we wait to see just what Germany’s other museums will do with the 700-plus pieces they still retain. With the Nigerian people sidelined, there’s a strong case for rescinding agreements already signed by well-meaning museums.
Students from the University of Cambridge have taken to shouting the genocidal slogan ‘From the river to the sea’ and inciting an ‘intifada’ at their encampment outside King’s College. The Mailhas the story.
The pro-Palestinian demonstration is being mirrored outside the Pitts Rivers museum in Oxford despite fears from Jewish students that the encampments will fuel a fresh wave of antisemitic attacks.
In Cambridge, students have been seen marching through the city to the Old Schools University Offices while chanting “Israel is a terrorist state” whilst the Oxford demonstration has a more muted, authoritarian flavour.
Media covering the event in the city have been mobbed and abused by demonstrators whilst attendees to the encampment have been told they must be “committed to upholding the Thawabit” in order to join in.
Dozens of masked campaigners spent the night sleeping in tents outside the universities and have a packed day planned featuring marches, speeches and ‘apartheid workshops’.
Following their march through the city, Cambridge demonstrators lounged on the lawn and tucked into a lunch of pesto pasta and focaccia bread.
In Coventry, a copycat protest to those at Oxbridge has struck up in protest of the University of Warwick’s ties with arms manufactures.
The sit-in rallies, which echo protests seen in the U.S. which later saw violent students clashing with police, have sprung up at other U.K. universities including Manchester, Leeds, Bristol, Sheffield and Newcastle over the last week.
In a statement, the President of the Oxford Jewish Society said: “Since the attacks in Israel on October 7th, Jewish students across Oxford are facing a wave of intimidation and harassment.
“This includes protest chants and signs which violate the University’s commitment to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliances’ definition of antisemitism.
“Now, with the encampment seeking to mimic what has been seen across United States campuses, we are deeply concerned that there will be further escalation in the vilification of Jewish students in Oxford.”
The concern was echoed by Jewish students in Cambridge. where 60 tents have been pitched up. …
In a shocking outburst, one protestor is seen ripping the flag from him and tossing it to the ground as the lone Jewish student was pushed and jostled by other activists.
Mr. Vladimir told MailOnline: “I had to come here to express my support for Israel. If these people have a right to protest then so do I.
“As you saw, I didn’t feel particularly welcome. I was pushed and shoved and felt quite scared.
“But I wanted these people to know that the Jewish people will never be defeated and we stand with Israel.”
Mr. Vladimir is a first year history student at Christ’s College who comes from New York.
He said he was alone because many of his fellow Jewish students feel “intimidated”, and were too scared to join him.
“A lot of Jewish students on campus feel quite scared,” he added. “They are just keeping their heads down. But I had to take a stand.
“This encampment is going to make Jewish students even more concerned. How would you feel walking past people who are supporting Hamas?” …
No police were present at the encampment or rally, something Ari thinks would have “made him feel safer” and given more protection to counter protestors.
Ari added: “I have to walk through here all the time. I’m still recognisably Jewish and I would not feel safe.”
Stop Press: In the Telegraph, Michael Deacon points out the brazen hypocrisy of the non-Palestinian student protesters wearing the keffiyeh. Isn’t ‘cultural appropriation’ supposed to be racist?
In the Telegraph, Oxford professor Nigel Biggar laments the support of Oxford academics and staff for pro-Palestinian student protesters at the university. Here’s an excerpt:
Three hundred and one Oxford academics and staff have signed an online letter declaring their support of the students’ “entirely reasonable” demand that the university disinvest from “Israel’s genocide in Gaza”.
There’s no cause for panic. The signatories represent a fraction of the 15,000 professors, research staff, and doctoral students at Oxford. …
Yet, what should still dismay is that highly educated grown-ups in one of the world’s leading universities – some of them occupying very senior positions – have got their history, ethics and law so wrong. …
Before 1914 the land in Palestine on which Zionists settled had been purchased from Arab landlords. Moreover, many of the settlers were refugees from murderous pogroms in Russia. Naturally, Arab peasants who had worked the land for generations resented it when their tenancies weren’t renewed. The process was legal under Ottoman law.
In 1922, the League of Nations mandated Britain to administer Palestine, in order to build a new independent Arab state and a Jewish homeland out of the ruins of the irredeemable Ottoman Empire. In 1930, faced with violent Arab unrest, the British considered restricting Jewish immigration but decided against it out of sympathy for Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. When Britain unilaterally withdrew from Palestine in February 1947, Zionists occupied only 10% of Palestinian territory.
The main displacement of the Arab population happened after that, when invading Arab armies attempted to crush the infant State of Israel in 1948-9. This propelled 750,000 Arabs to flee, abandoning their land. Many were expelled. Yet, when Arab troops occupied Jerusalem, Jews too were forced out and about 900,000 more were driven from Arab countries, most seeking refuge in Israel. …
As for ethics, the… dreadful truth is that the prosecution of war invariably involves civilian casualties. And when there are sufficiently compelling reasons for fighting – say, self-defence against a manifestly genocidal Hamas – those casualties may be, tragically, justified. That’s why the laws of war don’t forbid the killing of non-combatants as such, but only their intentional and disproportionate killing: the objective must be a military one, and the harm done civilians incidental to the military purpose and no greater than necessary. …
On the matter of law, the International Court of Justice has not, as the Oxford signatories claim, judged the situation in Gaza as “plausibly amounting to genocide”. In paragraph 30 of its January 2024 ruling of the case brought by South Africa, the court made quite clear that it was “not required to ascertain whether any violations of Israel’s obligations under the Genocide Convention have occurred”.
Stop Press: In the Spectator, Gareth Roberts isn’t shedding any tears over the U.K. university courses on race and colonialism that are facing the axe due to cuts.
I studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. It is a grand college: has no sense of inferiority. They have dinners where they say they have more Nobel Prizes than France. I probably acquired a sense of indomitability from being an undergraduate there: I stayed as a graduate, and only later realised that those who came in from other universities felt obliged to work hard in order to prove their worthiness, whereas I was rather careless, still gilded by the gold of youthful glory. When I look back I sometimes wonder how I would have had to change my behaviour in order to become a Cambridge Professor. Certainly, what I did was wrong. I struggled against the system, in finals got my lowest marks (an unforgettable beta double minus and gamma minus) in the subject I now teach (“arrogant and ignorant,“ said the examiner) and survived only as an eccentric hangover of the old order.
What is Trinity? It is a Great Court, built on the site of two older medieval halls, and paid for out of some of the money Henry VIII acquired by dissolving the monasteries. The college, somewhat ironically, was called the Holy and Undivided Trinity: Henry VIII trying to indicate that he was doing something for religion rather than against it. And Trinity has thrown out a vast number of famous names: Francis Bacon, Lord Macaulay, Isaac Newton and Tennyson can all be seen in statuesque form in the chapel. There were also Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and among scientists, James Clerk Maxwell, J.J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford. When I was an undergraduate, the Master was the renowned mathematician, Michael Atiyah. Later, there was Amartya Sen. Lord Byron went to Trinity – of course he did. He had a bear, wrote poems, enjoyed an irregular love life, died trying to liberate Greece.
It all sounds glorious. It was. Back in the 1990s, everything looked as it had probably done in the 1950s. A bus drove through the centre of town. There were bookshops everywhere. The rooms had bar fires and blankets on the beds. There were hardly any cafes. No one had a phone or a television. Everyone had a sheet of paper on the door for messages, whimsical and frequent. I knew where no one was, and so spent great amounts of time, like Diogenes, without lamp but with bicycle, drifting around in search of a man or woman. Only slowly were the cafes and quilts coming in, and the bookshops and buses going out. Trinity generously paid to increase the temperature in the University Library, to help the scholars dose at their books. (The irony: twenty years later they have lowered the temperature in the college, to keep the scholars alert for the coming climate apocalypse.) College bars were spruced up: when I arrived in Trinity, the college bar was a revolting place which I only entered twice. ‘Norman’, the barman, looked quite out of place when they built him a new airport style bar.
Enough of all that. The reason I am writing this is to say that Trinity is in trouble, and is in more trouble than has been made public. Last week, David Abulafia wrote in the Spectator that Trinity should not have sent some spears back to Australia – spears originally taken by Captain Cook’s men – and related this to the recent invigorating spraying-on and slashing-of the portrait of Lord Balfour in Trinity by an aggrieved young pro-Palestinian woman. Abulafia complained that Trinity’s response to the latter was “soggy”. The college said it “regretted the damage done” and wanted to offer “support” to anyone “affected” by the incident. The spears to suggest the college is soggily decolonising rapidly. But the “soggy” response is not simply to do with spears and paintings. It is also to do with – deep breath – COVID-19.
Every alumnus of Trinity receives a copy of the Annual Record. It is a compilation of speeches, notices and obituaries. But in 2020 something changed. The Annual Record, probably for the first time in its history, started to become a propaganda sheet.
Part of the reason is probably that the Master at the time was, and still is, Dame Sally Davies. She was appointed in 2019, and was the first woman to become Master. More significantly, she had no prior connection to the college. Contrast this with the previous Masters: Winter, Rees, Sen, Atiyah, Huxley, Hodgkin – all academics and originally undergraduates at Trinity. We have to go back to Rab Butler in the 1960s to find someone who was not an undergraduate and then was appointed Master: though his great-uncle had also been Master and Butlers have been tied up with Cambridge for centuries. Does this matter? Well, what we have is an institution which cares a great deal about institutional continuity. But then, a new Master is appointed in 2019: not really an academic; in fact, a doctor-turned-civil-servant, coming from Manchester Medical School, the University of London, the Civil Service and the Department of Health. As if this were not enough, [flourish with drum and trumpets] she was Chief Medical Officer previous to Chris Whitty.
Let me take you through the Annual Records. In 2020, there was not much about Covid, though there was plenty about ‘greening’ the college, and raising the LGBTQ+ flag during all of February. It was in 2021 that I began to wonder what had gone wrong. Baron Chartres, former Bishop of London, gave a feeble speech in March at the Feast for the Commemoration of Benefactors (held online) about how we should abandon ‘egocentricity’ and adopt ‘ecocentricity’ – also using the phrase ‘build back better’. He spoke of ‘lockdown’ as a ‘compulsory Lent’. Another speech was given by a Professor who was serving on SPI-M and SAGE, and who complimented the Master for having moved “from guarding the health of our nation, to ensuring the continued health of our college”. Then Dame Sally Davies herself gave a speech. Here are the relevant bits:
We could have entered lockdown earlier… I still do not understand why it took Europe, and Britain in particular, so long to accept the evidence that mask wearing protected others from catching Covid as well as themselves… Our Council agreed in June that… we would insist on mask wearing within college… By now the evidence is clear on this issue. Indeed, recently the American Centres for Disease Control shared the evidence that wearing two masks was better than one… Easter term arrived, sadly not with our students… Our chaplains have been leading masked and distanced welfare teas and pizza evenings, even Halloween events, and all within Government guidelines… A highlight of this Lent term has been the agreement by Council to commit Trinity College to achieve carbon Net Zero by 2050 and to divest from all fossil fuel investments in public equities before the end of 2021… Fellows have been asked not to come into college… We are lucky none of our Fellows died of Covid… We all recognise that this pandemic has exposed and amplified existing structural inequalities, physical and mental health deficits as well as the chronic under-funding of many services and sectors. The exit strategy for universities will, like other sectors, be linked to the suppression of the virus… Our purpose in Trinity is scholarship. [“Evidently not,” I wrote in the margin.]
There was also good news from the BA (that is, undergraduate) Society, which opened new posts for an Ethnic and Inclusion Officer and an Environmental Officer. Eid al-Fitr was celebrated for the first time by the college.
The speech next year was equally stimulating. There was more talk of “decarbonising”. Also, mention was made of visits to the college by those heroes of the modern higher thought, Justin Welby, Nancy Pelosi and Stormzy – I kid ye not.
Your college [declared the Master] continues to be a pioneer of sustainability in Cambridge… I have been working hard too… In 2020, as I watched the pandemic sweep across our world, I came to the realisation that government and health system responses were based on limited data. To respond effectively, they needed behavioural data, including movement, attitudes, behaviours, expenditure and more – yet, when we look for the status, this data is generally held in the private sector. So with support from Council, colleagues and the WHO, I set up the Trinity Challenge. I raised £7.8 million to run this charity and awarded £7.8.million prize money aiming to surface and foster innovation through a challenge, to strengthen our work as a global society… [blah, blah] Google, Microsoft, Facebook… [blah, blah] I want to thank McKinsey and Company… Please recognise that whatever politicians say about Covid, it is probable we will see new variants… Brexit is another storm that returns time and time again…
I am not sure what is going on. First of all, with the language: ‘status’ and ‘surface’ seem to have acquired new meanings. But it should now be obvious that a major academic institution has been captured by a sort of uncritical, average civil-service, new-liberal, corporate-agreeable, globalist opinion, which can only be intended to impose woeful conformity on the minds of our most brilliant young. I fear for the university. Cambridge was still eccentric and electric, varied and wayward when I was there. Now it seems to be emptying itself out from the river to the sea, by way of Kings Lynn. It wouldn’t surprise me if Oxford and Cambridge are entering a second 18th Century – when everything intellectually interesting will have to happen somewhere else (as it did in the 18th Century, just ask Adam Smith or Edward Gibbon). I say this, with the qualification that all our latest professors probably think of themselves as the Newtons, Macaulays and Bacons of our age: as they trot out their robotic ChatGTP opinions on climate change, humanitarian catastrophe, sustainability, inequality, masks and Brexit.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
In the past fortnight, revised drafts of the World Health Organisation’s Pandemic Accords (a draft new Pandemic Agreement, and a package of amendments to the existing International Health Regulations) have been made available. Although the new texts, especially as regards the IHRs, mark a significant improvement on the egregious overreach of the previous circulated drafts, significant concerns remain.
This briefing paper explains the key changes and persisting issues. In summary:
Many of the most egregious proposals in the original IHR amendments package have been dropped or significantly scaled back, including:
Proposals which would have ordained the WHO with powers to issue binding directives to Member States (dropped)
Proposals which would have erased reference to “dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms” (dropped)
Proposals which would have allowed the WHO to intervene on the basis of having identified a mere “potential” health emergency (dropped)
Provisions which had proposed to expand the scope of the IHR’s to include “all risks with a potential to impact public health” (dropped)
Provisions expressly favouring the use of digital health passports (dropped)
Proposals which aimed to construct a global censorship and ‘information control’ operation led by the WHO (dropped, though the texts still commit States to enhance their abilities to counter ‘misinformation and disinformation’)
Plans for the WHO to police compliance with all aspects of the IHRs (scaled back).
Significant issues remain across both texts, including:
Affirmation of the WHO as “the directing and coordinating authority on international health work, including on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response”. Whilst attempts to supercharge the WHO’s authority and power have been scaled back from the original proposals, the Pandemic Agreement and the IHRs are still intended by the WHO and its Member States to form a strengthened mandatory global framework agreement for pandemic management as part of a longer-term transfer of public health decision-making away from community and national levels.
Covid interventions as a blueprint for future pandemic action. The proposals start from the premise that the array of Covid interventions actioned during the pandemic are a suitable blueprint to direct future pandemic response behaviour. This is an extremely controversial starting point, which for the U.K. hugely prejudges the findings of the Covid Inquiry.
Proposals which envisage a strengthening of national pathogen surveillance hardwire in a surveillance-first strategy which seems guaranteed to increase the perception of regular pandemic threats and the likelihood of triggering drastic responses to routine outbreaks.
Proposals which grant the WHO Director General power to declare a pandemic emergency continue to vest unacceptably significant discretionary power in just one individual.
In promoting the use of behavioural science and ‘risk communication’ the texts ordain the use of nudge, propaganda and censorship. A more appropriate strategy would be to embed legal and practical protections for scientific debate and free speech.
Taken together the two Accords would commit the U.K. to supporting the WHO’s global response strategies come what may, and would seek to commit us to significant new funding obligations as part of that. There is no good reason to bind ourselves to the WHO, with its poor pandemic management track record, at least until major reform of that organisation, including its funding model, has been secured.
The texts assume the need and desirability for an interventionist response to future pandemics, using the Covid response as a starting point. That flawed assumption further relies on an assumption that there are properly functioning and effective national regulatory regimes in place. The reality across all major jurisdictions is systemic regulatory capture by private industry which, in the U.K., parliamentarians and experts have already called out as a clear threat to patient safety.
As of the time of writing, there are only three weeks left until the vote on these proposals is due to be put to the World Health Assembly. Reports suggest that negotiations across many key provisions are still ongoing, and as a result further changes can be expected to these generationally important texts. Any sensible period for scrutiny is over, and the democratic illegitimacy of forcing through a vote on these controversial agreements within the originally planned timeframe will further decimate trust in public health, and the World Health Organisation.
Legitimate questions have also been raised about the legality of any adoption vote for the IHR amendments taking place in May 2024, given the impossibility of complying with necessary legal notice periods under Article 55 of the IHR.
More broadly, it is inappropriate for the U.K. now to deepen its integration into a multilateral organisation about which serious governance, ethical, conflict and competency concerns persist: in relation to its senior personnel, its duplicity and mishandling of these negotiations and its private funding arrangements and motivations. Each of these points is discussed more fully below.
Context
This briefing paper explains the twinned proposals, coordinated by the World Health Organisation and negotiated by its constituent Member States, for a package of amendments to the existing International Health Regulations (IHRs), and for a new Treaty on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response styled as the ‘WHO Pandemic Agreement’. The two documents are intended to operate, and need therefore to be read, alongside each other.
There has been vocal public concern about these documents and the fact that the amendments to the IHRs have been negotiated in near total secrecy.
In April 2024, an interim draft ‘Bureau’s text’ of the proposed IHR amendments was released by the WHO. This was the first interim draft text released since the original package of amendments (dated November 2022) was published in early 2023, after which all of the intervening negotiations took place essentially in private. Many of those original proposals would, if retained, have resulted in serious transgressions against national decision-making autonomy, free speech and human rights.
A week later, an updated draft of the Pandemic Agreement was published to coincide with the final meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) charged with finalising that document. In stark contrast to the IHR negotiations, multiple interim drafts of the Pandemic Agreement have been made available over the course of the negotiation period.
As we explain in this document, the interim draft of the IHRs released in April marks a material improvement on many of the most critical issues raised by the original IHR amendment proposals. That said, many concerns still remain both as regards the intention and legal impact of the two documents when read together, and in respect of the underlying ethos, funding structure and process and timing for these twin proposals.
The commentary which follows is based on the two draft texts identified above. We understand that negotiations have not yet concluded and it is likely that the substance of either document will change before it is finalised.
Continuing Concerns With the Legal Texts
Role of the WHO: Though, as we explain in more detail below, the IHRs no longer expressly empower the WHO to give binding directions to Member States, as had originally been tabled, the drafting which remains across the two legal texts both expressly and implicitly regards the WHO as “the directing and coordinating authority on international health work, including on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response”. While this has always been the stated intention of the documents, there is an overarching question as to why, given its poor performance in both managing and investigating the causes of the Covid pandemic, national governments are contemplating elevating it as a global health authority.
There is an extent to which any international treaty represents an incursion into national sovereignty and autonomy. Although the amended IHRs will no longer include powers for the WHO unilaterally to give binding directions to Member States, the IHRs and the Pandemic Agreement remain binding agreements as a matter of international law, and in many respects seek to strengthen and expand an already mandatory framework not only for international cooperation but also for national-level approaches and capacities for preventing and responding to health risks.
Covid interventions as a blueprint: Throughout both documents assumptions both explicit and implicit are made across the two documents as to the permanent desirability and effectiveness of a global and interventionist response including “control measures”, quarantines, restrictions on movement and societal lockdowns. None of these measures are without controversy, and eminent experts continue to debate their relative and absolute efficacy in relation to Covid. With the U.K.’s Covid Inquiry still yet to complete its evidence gathering, let alone report any conclusions, it would be premature to commit the U.K. to a public health regime that prioritises these measures and obliges us progressively to strengthen our commitment to using them.
Commitments to a surveillance-led prevention strategy: Public health commentators have questioned the WHO’s desire seemingly to prioritise pandemic surveillance and prevention at the expense of competing health priorities, including hygiene and healthcare initiatives in developing countries that have historically saved millions of lives each year. Commentators have also pointed out that creating an industrial complex to identify new pandemic threats will inevitably increase the perception of pandemic threats and the likelihood of triggering drastic responses to routine outbreaks.
The surveillance-related proposals which remain in the interim draft of the IHRs appear to fall far short of the expansive original proposals under which the WHO would have coordinated a global system of local, regional and national surveillance operations (Article 44, Annex 1 and New Annex 10). Yet the apparent presumption that it will be desirable – continuously – to seek out new pathogens and variants evidently has not abated, and remains reflected both in the IHRs text and, particularly, in the draft Pandemic Agreement.
In the new draft IHR text, Member States will commit to develop, strengthen and maintain pathogen surveillance capacity, with supporting obligations to “progressively strengthen” surveillance activities also still appearing in the Pandemic Agreement; this reinforces a provision already in the IHRs which obliges all Member States to develop, strengthen and maintain their capacity to assess, notify and report public health emergency events, including pandemics.
Use of behavioural science and information control: Not only does the draft Pandemic Agreement envisage deploying some of the most controversial techniques used during the Covid pandemic, it commits each Member State to develop and strengthen plans for promoting “social and behavioural sciences” and “risk communications… for pandemic prevention, preparedness and response”.
These are euphemistic terms for what became in the Covid context the use of fear, psychological techniques, social stigmatisation and propaganda. Similarly controversial are provisions relating to information control. As we discuss more fully below, although ambitious plans to anoint the WHO as a turbo-charged global censorship agency appear to have been dropped from the new draft IHR text, amendments aimed at strengthening each Member State’s “risk communications” operations nevertheless remain by way of updates to Annex 1 of the draft IHRs, which oblige Member States to develop, strengthen and maintain their capacity to counter “misinformation and disinformation”.
Though this seems benign, given what has been learned – since the Pandemic Agreement was first proposed – about the extent and effect of State-led censorship and propaganda during the pandemic, a more appropriate strategy would be to embed legal and practical protections for scientific debate, and for free speech more generally.
Concrete obligations to commit funding: The original (CA+) draft of the Pandemic Agreement proposed to commit all Member States to substantial public spending commitments including a requirement to allocate at least 5% of national health budgets and an unspecified additional percentage of GDP to pandemic prevention, preparation and response initiatives. Additional provisions across the two draft documents anticipated Member States participating in pandemic funding arrangements designed primarily to support Member States whose infrastructure and health systems needed to be upgraded to meet presumed IHR standards.
Though these granular and significant commitments have disappeared from the new draft IHRs text, and had earlier been removed from the draft Pandemic Agreement, the draft Pandemic Agreement nevertheless still requires Member States both to strengthen domestic funding for pandemic-related activities, and to mobilise additional financial resource to assist other Member States. Member States will also commit via the Pandemic Agreement to participate in a ‘Coordinating Financial Mechanism’ to support pandemic-related activities in developing countries. These provisions are clearly intended to imply some level of new and additional financial commitment, but leave the quantification of those commitments for another day and, presumably, another negotiation among national governments.
As has been reported in U.K. press, the Pandemic Agreement in its current draft form also envisages a new mechanism (similarly yet to be designed or agreed) through which the WHO would acquire a right to demand zero- or low-cost access to up to 20% of global production of “safe, efficacious and effective pandemic-related health products”. It is not immediately clear how this would be funded, but as the pharmaceutical industry is not party to the Pandemic Agreement it must be presumed that the costs of funding this transfer of resources at the WHO’s request are to be underwritten by Member States.
One Health: The Pandemic Agreement advocates for, and requires Member States to commit to promote, a ‘One Health’ approach to public health management, defined as “an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimise the health of people, animals and ecosystems”. Recital 17 to the Agreement calls out a number of growing perceived threats to public health, including “climate change”, “poverty and hunger”, and “fragile and vulnerable settings” (an unexplained concept). Although, as we explain below, earlier proposals which would have expanded the scope of the WHOs areas of interest under the IHRs to include all risks with a potential to impact public health have been scaled back, these ‘One Health’ elements of the Pandemic Agreement continue to echo the expansionist ambitions of the WHO. In particular they require Member States to “protect animal and plant health”, as well as human health, by“…implementing policies that reflect a One Health approach as it relates to pandemic prevention, preparedness and response”. It is hard to see how this reconciles with, for example, advice that triggers the production and disposal of billions of non-compostable single use face masks and testing kits.
Recognising, perhaps, that the One Health framework as drafted is a vague and nebulous concept, the Pandemic Agreement provides in a seemingly open-ended clause that the “modalities, terms and conditions and operational dimensions of a One Health Approach shall be further defined in an instrument that… will be operational by May 31st, 2026”. In other words, the details are shelved for a future date.
Regulatory strengthening: Article 14 of the Pandemic Agreement requires Member States to strengthen national and regional regulatory authorities and to ensure that emergency regulatory authorisations for pandemic-related health products can be processed during a pandemic. This assumes, of course, that national and regional regulatory authorities can already be relied upon to conduct approval processes and post-authorisation product safety monitoring competently and comprehensively; and that emergency authorisations function properly as accelerated safety approval processes. As volumes of critical academic, clinical and also now legal documentation in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Australia and elsewhere is revealing, this has apparently not always proven to be the case in relation to products granted emergency use authorisations during the Covid pandemic. Certainly there have been serious doubts raised by parliamentarians in relation to the competence and capabilities of the U.K. medicines regulator.
Whatever one’s view on the emerging evidence of procedural failings and inadequacies, conflicts of interest in medicine approval processes, and whatever one’s view on the reliability, independence and objectivity of the major medicines regulators, if only because of the documented close financial and organisational ties between key actors in the pharmaceutical industry and the WHO and senior public health officials, Article 14 of the Pandemic Agreement must be read with a degree of healthy scepticism.
Ethics and human rights: As discussed more fully below, one of the most egregious provisions contemplated in either document was a proposal in the original IHRs text to delete reference to the primacy of “dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms” as a guiding principle of the IHRs. Although that proposal has been dropped, many of the pandemic management measures contemplated in these two documents (lockdowns, the use of behavioural science nudges, mandatory restrictions of personal and community freedoms) are nevertheless controversial from an ethical perspective.
Particularly controversial is a provision in the IHR text which contemplates that the legal requirement for an individual to give informed consent to medical interventions may be overridden by providing that Member States may, including expressly in the absence of consent, “compel” travellers to “undergo… vaccination or other prophylaxis”.
Mission and Funding Structure of the Who
It is legitimate to say that the Pandemic Agreement and the IHRs are still intended by the WHO and its Member States to form a strengthened global framework agreement for pandemic management as part of a longer-term transfer of public health decision-making away from community and national levels; and it seems self-evident that the WHO aspires to play a more-than-advisory role in that global framework.
It would equally be legitimate to say that the expansionist ambitions implicit in the WHO’s One Health concept, and the presumption that a ‘whole-of-society’ approach to managing health emergencies including pandemics is always desirable, pose a threat for those who believe the role of the WHO should be still to promote ‘the highest attainable standard of health’ for the many by supporting and empowering rather than directing national and community-level healthcare.
There are also serious problems with the funding arrangements for the WHO:
Less than 20% of the WHO’s financing originates from core contributions by Member States; the majority of its funding is for specified purposes. Much of that ‘specified purpose’ funding comes from private donors with direct and indirect financial interests in the pharmaceutical industry, which evidently stands to profit from a medicalised approach to pandemic prevention and response. Despite vocal public concern about the conflicts and incentives inherent in this funding model, in 2022 the WHO established the WHO Foundation explicitly to attract ‘philanthropic’ donations from the commercial sector. The Foundation was established explicitly to insulate the WHO from potential conflicts of interest and reputational risk, yet in its short life the Foundation has already been accused of a lack of transparency and behaviours which undermine good governance.
Central to the WHO’s continuing relevance, and arguably its reason for being, is the notion that a more globalised system of public health management will provide better health outcomes for all. Yet when viewed in the context of the increasing dominance of private-interest funding referenced above, it becomes more obviously apparent why an unelected and democratically unaccountable multilateral organisation with a globalist and pro-corporate outlook may no longer be well placed to serve the needs of (possibly any) countries, communities or individuals.
Process and Timing
It remains the WHO’s intent to finalise the two documents so that a final draft of each text can be presented at the World Health Assembly meeting taking place at the end of May 2024. The IHR amendments could be adopted by a simple majority of Member States at that meeting and would come into force 12 months later (following expiry of a 10 month opt-out period); the Pandemic Agreement requires a two-third majority approval and would then come into force once it has been ratified or otherwise approved by at least 60 Member States.
A legitimate question mark has been raised as to the legality of any adoption vote for the IHR amendments taking place in May 2024, which turns on the interpretation and application of Article 55 of the existing in force version of the IHRs. That question is not addressed in this briefing but we have commented on it elsewhere.
Commentary on the April 17th, 2024 Draft IHR Amendments
By any measure, the April 2024 interim draft version of the IHR amendments reflects a material change of tone and position relative to the original package of proposed amendments. Whilst questions remain about the significant overreach and expansionist ambitions evident in the original draft IHR proposals and the most recent version of the Pandemic Agreement, in our view the new draft reflects a material and meaningful retreat from the original ambitious proposals for revising the IHRs.
It must also be recognised that the purpose of the IHR amendment exercise has only ever been to expand the scope of the IHRs and strengthen existing positions and powers; it has never been on the table to narrow the scope or powers that have been in force in various forms for decades, and most recently updated in 2005.
We summarise in the following section the key changes between the January 2022 draft proposals for the IHR amendments and the April 2024 version.
1. The WHO’s recommendations remain non-binding. Article 13A.1 which would have required Member States to follow directives of the WHO as the guiding and coordinating authority for international public health has been dropped entirely.
One of the most controversial proposals in the original package of amendments was to amend the definitions of WHO temporary and standing recommendations to explicitly delete reference to those recommendations being “non-binding”.
This, together with a new Article 13A.1 requiring Member States to “recognise [the] WHO as the guid[ing] and coordinating authority of international public health response” and to “undertake to follow” its recommendations, would, if carried forward, have transformed the WHO from a purely advisory body to a supra-national public health executive authority with power to issue legally-binding advice and directions to Member States.
Though the Pandemic Agreement now includes a recital referencing the WHO’s role as a “directing authority” for public health, crucially, those key amendments to the IHRs have been dropped in their entirety in this interim text. This is a significant change of position because while it does not affect the binding nature of the obligations to which Member States will commit by adopting the updated IHRs, it does affect the force with which the WHO can issue any future statements or advisory communications while exercising its coordinating functions under the IHRs. According to this interim draft, all such WHO communications will remain advisory only.
The fact that this material amendment had been contemplated but is now seemingly rejected in the latest draft is helpful insofar as it should carry jurisprudential weight were any question to arise in the future as to whether a WHO advisory or recommendation issued pursuant to the IHRs should – in a domestic legal context – be considered binding.
That said, the latest draft has retained a provision which requires Member States “when requested by WHO” to provide “to the fullest extent possible within the means and resources at their disposal, support to WHO-coordinated response activities”. Concerns have rightly been raised that this could be read as a means of getting to a similar practical outcome where Member States consider themselves bound to do what they can to implement WHO advisories and recommendations. This may be particularly the case for those countries which rely materially on WHO support, and World Bank or IMF funding, for their domestic healthcare activities.
2. An egregious proposal which would have erased reference to the primacy of “dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms” has been dropped. This proposal marked a particularly low watermark, and should never have been suggested.
The original draft of the IHR amendments had proposed to delete from Article 3.1 of the IHRs the words “The implementation of these Regulations shall be with full respect for the dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of persons” and to replace them with “The implementation of these Regulations shall be based on the principles of equity, inclusivity, coherence and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities of the States Parties”.
This was an egregious change which would have cut across seven decades of international human rights norms and jurisprudence. The new interim draft now reads:
1. The implementation of these Regulations shall be with full respect for the dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of persons, and shall promote equity and solidarity among States Parties.
The additional recognition of equity and solidarity between nation states seems inoffensive, and unsurprising given what we understand to have been the equity-focussed nature of much of the recent negotiations.
3. Proposals to construct a global censorship and ‘information control’ operation led by the WHO have been scaled back.
The original draft IHRs text had proposed, in an extensively amended Article 44 and expanded Annex 1, to mandate that Member States collaborate with each other, and with the WHO, and that the WHO itself “at the Global level… strengthen capacities to… counter misinformation and disinformation”. The latter requirement in particular provoked controversy because it suggested that the WHO would develop its own information control and censorship operations distinct from the domestic activities of Member State governments and agencies, ‘at a global level’.
Those already concerned by the extent of the State-sponsored censorship and information control revealed to have taken place during the Covid pandemic had regarded the implication of any supra-national (and unelected, democratically unaccountable) authority acquiring the means and the legal standing to control lawful scientific and public debate at a national or global level as a profound threat to free speech, national autonomy and democracy, and human rights. This was particularly worrying when read alongside the proposed amendment to Article 3 of the IHRs explained in the previous section.
Those proposals have been scaled back significantly in the interim draft IHRs text, and in particular the ambition to anoint the WHO as a global centralised censorship authority appear to have been dropped. Amendments aimed at strengthening each Member State’s “risk communications” operations remain by way of updates to Annex 1, which oblige Member States to develop, strengthen and maintain their capacity to counter “misinformation and disinformation”.
The Pandemic Agreement too contains obligations for Member States to promote evidence-based information, promote trust in public health and cooperate with each other to prevent mis- and disinformation. These commitments seem ironic when viewed against the chronic lack of transparency which has plagued the negotiation process, and the concomitant deterioration of public trust in the process and in the WHO.
4. Provisions that would have allowed the WHO to intervene on the basis of a mere ‘potential’ health emergency have been dropped: a pandemic must now either be happening or likely to happen, but with the safeguard that to activate its IHR powers the WHO must be able to demonstrate that a series of qualitative tests have been met and that rapid coordinated international action is necessary.
Original proposals to modify Article 12 of the IHRs appeared to contemplate the Director General of the WHO being able to declare a public health emergency in circumstances where a perceived health threat is, in his opinion, either “actual” or merely “potential”.
The legal implication of that change, when read alongside other proposals to expand the scope of the IHRs and to give the WHO binding powers of direction over Member States (new Article 13A.1, described above), were of great concern. The proposal prompted legitimate commentary about the risk of the WHO pre-emptively identifying and declaring ‘potential’ emergencies in order to engage its more extensive powers, and access to Member State resources, under the modified terms of the IHRs.
In the interim draft, however, those modifications to Article 12 no longer appear and, as noted in the sections above, other relevant proposals including the central proposal to grant the WHO powers of direction, have also been deleted. Instead, the Working Group has modified the legal trigger for the Director General to declare a public health emergency so that it would now explicitly include a “pandemic” and a “pandemic emergency”, both of which are in effect subset concepts of the existing definition of a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC).
A pandemic emergency is defined as an infectious health emergency which is already, or is likely to be, spreading within multiple Member States, and must additionally be likely to overwhelm health systems, and likely to cause social, economic or political disruption in Member States. Thus it does involve a pre-emptive element (i.e. a potential rather than actual emergency), but crucially, and contrary to concerns that a small number of commentators have voiced, it is not an unfettered discretionary trigger or a hair trigger.
Specifically, to establish that a pandemic emergency is occurring, the definitional provisions as now drafted would require the Director General to establish that a “rapid, equitable and enhanced coordinate international” response is “required” (importantly not: ‘is likely to be required’) to an “extraordinary event” which constitutes “a public health risk… through the international spread of disease”.
In other words, if he abides by the terms of the IHR, the Director General will need to be able to evidence that an extraordinary international infectious public health risk has emerged in sufficiently clear terms that it already “requires” a rapid and coordinated international response. Moreover, he will need to demonstrate not only that the risk is or is likely to be spreading but also that it is likely to exceed the capacity of affected national health systems and cause social, economic and/or political disruption.
These function as cumulative tests rather than independent tests; so – as currently drafted – it should not legally be possible for the Director General to declare a pandemic emergency on the basis simply that, for example, health system capacity in some Member States can be stretched close to capacity in flu season.
While many commentators oppose, as a matter of principle, the notion that the authority to declare a public health emergency, including a ‘pandemic’ or a ‘pandemic emergency’, rests with the Director General of the WHO, concentrating decision-making powers in the hands of a single unelected and largely unaccountable individual, we have to recognise that this has been the case since 2005 and was not realistically a point on the table for negotiation during this current process. It is though yet another reason to support a wholesale review of the architecture and the balance of power and control across global, national and local public health bodies.
5. A dampening of the expansionist ambitions of the WHO: provisions which had proposed to expand the scope of the IHRs to include “all risks with a potential to impact public health” (e.g. climate change, food supply) have been deleted.
The original IHR amendments had, via Article 2, proposed to expand the scope of application of the IHRs so that they would apply to “all risks with a potential to impact public health”. This would have been a significant amendment which, allied with the proposal to give the WHO power to issue binding directions to Member States, many feared was intended to enable the WHO to expand its spheres of control and influence firmly into areas such as climate change and food supply management.
In the interim draft, Article 2 is left essentially unchanged from its original form – the proposal seemingly rejected – save for the addition of an unsurprising reference to the purpose of the regulations including preparation for future pandemics.
The Pandemic Agreement nevertheless continues to advocate for the ‘One Health’ approach, discussed above.
6. Bold plans for the WHO to police compliance with all aspects of the regulations have been scaled back.
Whereas the original IHR amendment proposals had contemplated an Implementation Committee and a separate Compliance Committee being formed to oversee implementation and ongoing compliance with the amended instrument, in the new interim draft Article 54 bis envisages a Member State-led ‘IHR Implementation and Compliance Committee’ to facilitate and oversee implementation and compliance. Notably, and perhaps with a nod to earlier intense criticism of the potential impact of the original proposals on national sovereignty, that committee will be expressly directed by the IHRs to be “facilitative in nature” and to be “transparent, non-adversarial and non-punitive”. In other words, it can seek to persuade but shall have no sticks – an advisory rather than a directive body.
Nonetheless, in the interim draft IHRs text a new Article 4.1.bis expressly requires Member States to establish national-level authorities with responsibility for implementing the updated IHRs within their respective countries – i.e., a compliance framework is still envisaged, albeit the new text reflects a scaling back from the original proposals.
7. Many other provisions have been diluted, including provisions which would have encouraged and favoured digital health passports; and provisions requiring forced technology transfers and diversion of national resources.
A swathe of legacy IHR provisions relating to, among other matters, border control measures of questionable efficacy deployed during the Covid pandemic remain untouched in the interim draft (Articles 18 and 23), including quarantines, isolations, testing and requirements for vaccination, but a proposal originally to have been inserted as a new Article 23(6), which controversially would have created a presumption in favour of mandating digital health passports, has been dropped.
Unsurprisingly, it appears that provisions which could have forced transfers and licensing of drug and other medical technology IP rights have been removed from the interim draft, presumably under pressure from global pharmaceutical groups. The Pandemic Agreement contains soft provisions intended to prompt relevant Member States to encourage pharmaceutical groups within their influence to be helpful and benevolent with their patents, particularly for the benefit of developing countries, but these are now couched as barely-enforceable commitments to discuss.
In Conclusion
The unexpected extent of the scaling back in the long-overdue April 2024 draft IHRs text was unquestionably a positive development for those who had been concerned by the overreach of the original proposals.
It is nevertheless also now apparent from the late-April updated draft of the Pandemic Agreement that deletions from the draft IHRs text have, in some respects, been compensated for by new additions to that Pandemic Agreement. Whereas the IHRs had drawn a majority of the dissenting criticisms up to this point, the two texts are now perhaps of equal significance for issues of sovereignty, human rights and free speech.
Broader concerns persist, and in particular as to the globalist and pharma-centric mission of the WHO, its private interest funding relationships and many related conflicts of interest and risks of bias and corporate influence. These issues alone call into question whether countries such as the U.K. should be – perhaps hastily – committing to ever greater integration with this multilateral organisation, let alone binding itself to a globalised interventionist public health regime, the effectiveness of the core strategies of which are being examined by an ongoing public inquiry in the U.K.
Even a cursory review of the conduct of and public reaction to these post-pandemic negotiations exposes the damage done by the WHO, and particularly its Director General, to trust and confidence. It has been characterised by a lack of transparency, a seemingly duplicitous and defensive communications strategy, and a determination to silence and smear critics rather than engage.
In light of that, and the well-documented mis-steps and overreach of the WHO since 2020, critical thinkers must now question whether the Pandemic Treaty and IHRs remain an appropriate framework, and whether the WHO in its current form, with its current funding arrangements, remains an appropriate organisation to play a central, or indeed any, role in the management of future pandemics.
Molly Kingsley is a founder and Ben Kingsley is the Head of Legal Affairs at children’s rights campaign group UsForThem. Find UsForThem on Substack. This paper was republished in full with permission fromUsForThem.
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