Since the first day the Wuhan virus appeared in China, the World Health Organization (“WHO”) hasn’t tried hard to hide the politics driving its ostensibly health-based messages. Its latest effort in this regard is a change to its website, deleting any reference to naturally acquired immunity against the virus. From here on out, it’s all about getting vaccines, and ensuring that people stay in their homes until they get that needle stick in their arms.

It was apparent very quickly that WHO was operating as an extension of the Chinese Communist Party. At the end of January, WHO voted not to declare the virus “a public health emergency of international concern.” On February 3, WHO’s chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus objected to any travel bans targeting China. As March began, there were increasing numbers of recognized cases, although the mortality rate was low.

In mid-March, though, America went into full panic mode, as did the rest of the world. In April 2020, WHO was still openly running interference for China. Even when Ghebreyesus finally conceded that the Wuhan virus was an issue, he was still praising China for working “to protect their own people and the people of the world” and lauding its speed in dealing with the virus and making a “commitment to transparency and supporting other countries.”

My point is that the UN’s World Health Organization is utterly unreliable. It is carrying water for China and will do whatever China needs whether that’s defend China against charges that it is responsible for this scourge or helping it gain an advantage from the world’s hysterical response to the virus.

The latest example of WHO’s manipulating information for China involves a pretty startling deletion it made to its website. WHO’s latest contention is that the only way to achieve immunity is through the vaccine.

Jeffrey A. Tucker, writing at the American Institute for Economic Research, first noted this deviation for “the science.” Tucker explains how perfectly wonderful and undeniable herd immunity is:

Its discovery was one of the major achievements of 20th century science, gradually emerging in the 1920s and then becoming ever more refined throughout the 20th century. 

Herd immunity is a fascinating observation that you can trace to biological reality or statistical probability theory, whichever you prefer. (It is certainly not a “strategy” so ignore any media source that describes it that way.) Herd immunity speaks directly, and with explanatory power, to the empirical observation that respiratory viruses are either widespread and mostly mild (common cold) or very severe and short-lived (Ebola). 

Why is this? The reason is that when a virus kills its host, it cannot migrate. The more aggressively it does this, the less it spreads. If the virus doesn’t kill its host, it can hop to others through all the usual means. When you get a virus and fight it off, your immune system encodes that information in a way that builds immunity to it. When it happens to enough people (and each case is different so we can’t put a clear number on it) the virus loses its pandemic quality and becomes endemic, which is to say predictable and manageable. Each new generation incorporates that information through more exposure. 

Tucker noticed that, right after the news about the vaccine become public, WHO “literally changed the science in a Soviet-like way,” by removing any mention of natural herd immunity from its website. As late as June 9, 2020, WHO accurately stated on its website that herd immunity “happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection.”

By November 13, though, the idea of a previous infection as a route to herd immunity is gone. WHO now says that herd immunity occurs “if a threshold of vaccination is reached. Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it.”

In other words – no matter what happens, people must stay locked in their homes, unable to work or get on with ordinary life until they’ve received their vaccine, maybe sometime midway through 2021. This is not science, this is politics, and the political master is sitting in Beijing.

Image by Andrea Widburg