Sir Ray Avery is a pharmaceutical scientist with vast experience working in the world’s poorest nations. He recently penned three articles on Linked In regarding his experience with the World Health Organization and why we must reject the international health legislation they are planning to pass at the next World Health Assembly in May 2024.
This is my third opinion piece as to why NZ should not allow the WHO to dictate how our Government should manage manage infectious disease pandemics.
The WHO has for decades promoting its Global WASH program to improve access to safe water and says it aims to save 1.4 million lives a year. https://lnkd.in/giGukAfc
What gives me most angst about this report is that 54 million people in Bangladesh are right now drinking Arsenic contaminated water because in the 1970’s the WHO and UNICEF promoted and sponsored the drilling of 10 million backyard tube wells to provide safe drinking water for people.
UNICEF and WHO lauded this intervention a great success but the discovery of the arsenic poisoning from tube well drinking water was made in 1983, but it took about 10 years to be formally recognized as a large-scale problem.
Today millions of people in Bangladesh are still drinking arsenic contaminated water which does not comply with the out-of-date decades old WHO water quality standards.
Despite it being described as the largest mass poisoning in history the WHO and UNICEF have for decades failed to put in place a plan of corrective action largely because of the scale of the problem.
So, I have no confidence that the WHO has the skills, resources and qualification to oversee a global strategy for the management of an infectious disease outbreak .
A recurring thread in all my experiences with the WHO is the glacial speed that it works to fix problems ranging from providing safe drinking water or fixing the rampant sexual offending by WHO staff.
By way of example.
(WHO) dismissed Dr Maurizio Barbeschi, former head of its Health Security Unit, for sexual misconduct after a three-year investigation that started in January 2020.
The Italian national and biosecurity expert has worked for WHO for the past 20 years and is also an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Medicine of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia,
Three years to investigate sexual offending,50 years and counting to fix arsenic contaminated wells and two years to determine that Covid is airborne highlights the WHO inept management.
WHO is not a well-oiled machine but a hugely bureaucratic and ineffective healthcare agency and I don’t want to put the health and wellbeing of all New Zealanders in their hands.
The Labour Governments totalitarian Covid elimination strategy and promoting itself as the “single source of truth “ and shutting down informed scientific debate and labelling ethical scientists as conspiracy theorists shows how dangerous it may be to have the WHO dictate how we look after our own people.
Sir Ray
alicespringstomind 