Published in Financial Post, August 2, 2001. The original version was published in the Laissez-Faire City Times.
The World Health Organization is longing for the World Sanitary State or, at least, for a World Sanitary Cartel. It aims at global health control by politicians and bureaucrats in white lab coats.
This is not conspiracy theory -- no need for that sort of thing here. The logic of individual incentives and action in politicized systems, combined with the 20th century's reigning orthodoxy, is sufficient to explain where WHO is heading.
The story told by one of WHO's founders, Szeming Sze, shows that it was born of random events, individual whims, and politicking. Dr. Sze was a member of the Chinese delegation at the 1945 conference held in San Francisco to draw up the United Nations' charter. The idea of creating an international health agency just popped up in a conversation between the three physicians attending the conference. Then, he recalls, "I merely talked to my boss and he said 'Yes, go ahead.' ... Almost before I realized what was happening, I was landed with the job of presenting a proposal to the San Francisco Conference that would set up a single health organization." After this, he explains, "my part in the founding of WHO was 90% diplomatic and only 10% medical. It was politics all the time."
How the constitution was written bore the mark of 20th-century statism. Section 1 of WHO's constitution states the organization's objective as "the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health." This seems meaningless, as nobody would sacrifice everything for health -- for, then, what would health be useful for? But the constitution involves more than health. Its preamble proclaims: "Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity."
Even so broadly defined, health can be controlled and cured by medical or social practitioners. For the preamble explains that "[g]overnments have a responsibility for the health of their peoples which can be fulfilled only by the provision of adequate health and social measures." And read Section 11, about the delegates to the World Health Assembly, who "should be chosen from among persons most qualified by their technical competence in the field of health, preferably representing the national health administration of the Member." Labcoats, or whiteshirts, will give you social health.
From then on, WHO's fate was sealed. Financed by compulsory levies on taxpayers of member states, staffed by bureaucrats selected for their authoritarian busybodyism, it was bound, if unchecked, to become as much interested in alcohol, smoking and political correctness as in malaria, tuberculosis or sanitation.
Last spring, the World Health Assembly adopted a biennial US$2.2-billion budget, much of it unrelated to traditional public health activities in underdeveloped countries. The 35 "fields of work" in the budget include tobacco (US$25-million), mental health and substance abuse (US$28-million), sustainable development (US$18-million), women's health (US$15-million), health and environment (US$50-million), and evidence for health policy (US$43-million).
Then there's the Newspeak. For example, the field called health promotion (US$35-million) is assigned the goal of "[reducing] risks to people's health through gender- and age-sensitive policies and actions that deal with the broader determinants of health."
Moreover, 12% of WHO's budget, is allocated to the Geneva headquarters -- and this does not count all the money spent in Europe. No doubt there are poorer people in the world who could use these millions.
The government of Canada contributes about US$40-million to WHO's biennial budget (or US$20-million per year), making it the ninth largest contributor. More than one-third of the Canadian contribution is called "voluntary," which means that it is not mandated by WHO's membership rules. Over the 1998-99 biennium, at least US$430,000 of the feds' voluntary contribution was earmarked for WHO's global anti-smoking jihad. Of course, none of the US$40-million contribution is "voluntary" from the hapless Canadian taxpayer's point of view.
This is not counting other involuntary contributions from Canadian taxpayers, like the government of British Columbia's US$45,000 "donation" towards the anti-smoking war in 1998-99. Can you spare US$45,000? How generous our governments are! Obviously, they have lot of change to spare.
The main point is that WHO is spending an important, and apparently growing, part of its resources on "lifestyle diseases," fighting lifestyles it does not like. Among the "new ways of working" called for by the General Programme of Work 2002-2005 is "adopting a broader approach to health within the concept of human development, humanitarian action, equity between men and women, and human rights, with a particular focus on the links between health and poverty reduction." One of the four strategic directions consists of "promoting healthy lifestyles and reducing risk factors to human health that arise from environmental, economic, social and behavioural causes."
What of individual preferences for different lifestyles? In responding to individual choices and catering to minorities and non-PC preferences, markets have a way to undermine the uniformity of "social choices," which is why WHO hates the market. Director-General Gro Harlem Brundtland talks about the tobacco companies' "unhealthy hunt for profits." "Tobacco," she says, "steals from society." Whom does she take her money from? WHO's hatred for markets is not limited to the smoking issue. For example, says Dr. Brundtland, "most biotechnology research is now carried out in the industrialized world, and is primarily market-driven. This is ethically unacceptable."
WHO also employs faith-bound propaganda. To justify a meeting on Tobacco and Religion held at WHO headquarters in May, 1999, WHO argued that "[r]eligion represents a new frontier for public health in terms of partnership opportunities." Although some religious representatives did put tobacco, alcohol and prostitution in the same bag of sins, most religions appear relatively tolerant of smoking. The meeting summaries conveniently neglected to report on a presentation by a Protestant pastor, Professor Jean-Claude Basset, who argued that "[i]t is possible to propose to [adult smokers] the ideals of good health but not to impose them, if they prefer other values such as relaxation and the sense of well-being that tobacco induces." The meeting, then, was not a success, and its report, as WHO puts it, "is not a formal publication of the World Health Organization."
Now, suppose -- just suppose -- that there are some individuals who cannot reach near-complete mental and social well-being while they are ruled by the whiteshirts. How then will the whiteshirts realize "the attainment by all people of the highest possible level of health?" Impossible task? Logically, yes; politically, no. They will choose whom to oppress and whom to favour, or they will define social well-being so as to exclude the dissidents' preferences. And they will force the dissidents to pay taxes to their tormentors.