American Thought Leaders - Dr. David Bell: Public Health Is Moving Toward ‘International Fascism’

Episode Date: October 2, 2023

“People are thinking COVID has gone away and we're getting back to normal. But in a sort-of international public health world, that's not the case at all. We're building new institutions, we're expanding institutions, and all the expansion is around pandemic preparedness and response.”In this episode, I sit down with public health physician and Brownstone Institute fellow Dr. David Bell. A former World Health Organization medical officer, he recently published “Pandemic Preparedness and the Road to International Fascism” in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology.“The hope of writing the paper, and I think of us talking, is to try to get the public health world, who are very much on board with this and going forward with it, of stepping back and really thinking what they're doing, because they've repeatedly done huge harm to society over the last couple of hundred years. And it's clear that they're on that path again,” says Dr. Bell.He argues that public health played a large role in justifying the takeover of populations by colonial empires of Europe, and that given new International Health Regulations, which will have force under international law, it is likely that history may repeat itself.“Forerunners to the World Health Organization were the Paris Agreements and other agreements of the late 19th century around stopping pandemics coming from the colonies to Europe,” says Dr. Bell.

People are thinking COVID has gone away and we're getting back to normal. But in the sort of international public health world, that's not the case at all. We're building new institutions, we're expanding institutions, and all the expansion is around pandemic preparedness and response. In this episode, I sit down with public health physician and Brownstone Institute fellow Dr. David Bell, a former WHO medical officer. He recently published Pandemic Preparedness and the Road to International Fascism in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology. The hope of writing the

paper is to try to get the public health world, who are very much on board with this and going forward with it, of stepping back and really thinking what they're doing because they've repeatedly done huge harm to society over the last couple of hundred years and it's clear that they're on that path again. This is American Thought Leaders and I'm Janja Kellek. Dr. David Bell, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thanks. It's good to be here. You have written a really interesting paper recently. I'm kind of shocked given the title that it actually got published in a journal today. But more importantly than the title,

I think it paints an important picture that we should know about. I want to discuss that paper today with you. So, yeah, it's really the way I see, but I think it's clear the way that public health has gone. And as a public health physician, it's disturbing to see what has happened, but it's not in many ways surprising. So, you know, it's about the path we're taking really to international fascism and public health is playing a lead role in that through COVID and the pandemic preparedness agenda as we're on or chasing now. And I'm trying to point out that this is not new, that this is expected historically. If we go back to the colonialist era, public health played a large role in justifying the sort of takeover of other populations in the colonial empires of Europe. The pandemics played a big part in that. The forerunners to the WHO, the World Health Organization, were the Paris Agreements and other agreements

of the late 19th century around stopping pandemics coming from the colonies to Europe. And we move on there to sort of the eugenics era of the 1920s and 30s and the overt European fascism where doctors were overrepresented in the Nazis and also in Mussolini's fascism. Now, we're facing an era of emergency rule, rule by decree, a very close sort of symbiosis of large corporations and government, which is corporate authoritarianism, Mussolini's really definition of fascism.

We're seeing public health pushing this. We're seeing very strong sort of coercion, et cetera, censorship and vilification of people who don't comply. This is all being pushed based on a series of lies and fallacies which are obvious really. So it's sort of the classic fascist approach and in the same way it's concentrating wealth amongst these few that are orchestrating it. So the hope of writing the paper and I think of us talking is to try to get the public health world, who are

very much on board with this and going forward with it, of stepping back and really thinking what they're doing because they've repeatedly done huge harm to society over the last couple of hundred years. It's clear that they're on that path again. There's a number of reasons for that, why they comply, that we can go into. But first they've got to face reality around them. Whenever you say the word fascism, that's one of those... It's a trigger. Right, exactly. You throw out the word and it can be used.

And no one ever wants to be called that. And it's used liberally, frankly, in inappropriate ways to basically demonize people. I think we have to take extra attention today to justify your statement. Again, that's why I'm saying I'm surprised that it was published with that concept, but you're very serious in your treatment of this. You're not throwing this word out casually. All the steps that you've seen in a fascist model are being replicated. So what are those steps? First, we see this very tight cooperation of large corporations and government.

That's been increasing over the last few years. In public health, it started off with these public-private partnerships. And, you know, it seemed good at the start. Fascism is a trigger, but it's also a real thing. I mean, it's a trigger because of what happened in the Second World War. But fascism dominated, you know, the whole technocracy movement, the eugenics movement of the 1920s and 30s, John Hopkins School of Public Health started off around eugenics. This was mainstream public health.

And it's the thought that all people are not equal, but you have an elite that will manage the rest for the greater good. And this is a sort of corporate slash government elite that work very closely together. And that's, people have forgotten, but this was mainstream public health. It was mainstream thinking in the 20s and 30s in North America, for instance.

And then it became discredited and pushed aside for several decades after the war. We associate fascism with the idea of black and white pictures of people in jackboots. But in the 20s and 30s this was the progressive way forward, you know, pushed by the large corporations and by high levels of government, by certain professions. And it's a very attractive way because the idea is the experts decide what the masses do.

But where it leads is the forced sterilisation of people who are considered inferior, etc. This again was mainstream public health in North America not that long ago. And other examples like that and then it can go to the excesses that the Nazis took it but it's it's not people in jackboots breaking windows it's a sort of progressive view pushed by wealthy people which will eventually benefit them but we have to sort of see it with color glasses and not with the black-and-white film of the 1930s and recognize the progressive

movement now is very much aligned with that. So it's an easy place to fall into. It also arose very much from the left in those days, from the left of politics as we call it now. It's a funny term. That's interesting that you mention that, because typically people will juxtapose and say, well, communism is the left and fascism is the right. But you're saying that the fascism is actually a progressive movement. That's how it was seen, and that's how the New York Times saw it. That's how Time magazine saw it. They had Hitler as man of the year in the 1930s. Right, left, it's a totalitarian way of viewing things.

I think it differs from classic communism in that you've got an elite who are dictating, whereas supposedly in communism all people are equal. In fascism they're not. But in the end it's a totalitarian approach and it's interesting and it's kudos to the journal that they published the paper with that name and it shows that not all publishing is completely bought. I think that they are willing to publish a diversity of views. But if we stop and look at it, then we can start to look at where we're going and the pandemic preparedness agenda where we're really co-opting public money for the benefit of private interests, for a fallacy.

The idea that pandemics are an existential threat, they weren't in the 1990s. And we should be even better at it now. They haven't been since the 1920 Spanish flu when we didn't have antibiotics and people died of secondary infections. So people die, health-wise, they die of a whole lot of other diseases, heart disease, cancer in other countries, tuberculosis, malaria, etc. And the outbreaks, even Ebola and so on, these are a tiny fraction of life years lost of mortality. So the whole agenda now that pandemics are an existential threat, it's built on a fallacy. It's simply

not true historically. The only way it can be true is if we're going to have a whole series of lab leaks or releases of engineered viruses, because it's not going to happen naturally. So if something is built on a fallacy like that, and it's so strongly pushed and taking over the agenda of health and of society, then you need to look at what is going on and why this is happening. It's not a normal way for humans or society to act to sort of massively overemphasise a threat. So then you look at who is gaining from this and during the covert outbreak where we had a virus that appears almost certainly engineered and probably accidentally released but we don't know of hundreds of billions of dollars accumulated in the hands of a relatively few people.

And these people and corporations were the ones who, at the start of the COVID outbreak, said we should throw away all prior public health knowledge from how we handle an outbreak, which WHO has published, we never lock down, we never do those things, to the idea that a you know, the hundred, or actually a couple of thousand years of knowledge of natural immunity is thrown out, et cetera. So all that was thrown out.

We based, you know, we had a series of lies, like natural immunity doesn't work against respiratory viruses, et cetera. And we had a virus that caused people at the average age of about 75 to 80, which we knew at the very start of 2020 from what happened in China. So these certain entities and people, they push very strongly that we lock down everyone in society, that we close businesses, that we pretend that we have no defence against viruses naturally and that we have no medicinal defences against this virus, even though things like vitamin

D and so on are very basic and scientifically based, they improve immune function which we use to fight viruses ourselves. So, and then inevitably in doing that, we shifted wealth from all the people who used to work to the people who were gaining from these lockdowns, which was initially was very much software companies. And then as we shifted to mass vaccination with an injectable vaccine, which is know already is not going to work very well against respiratory viruses and Anthony Fauci published a paper in January of this year pointing

out that we always knew it wouldn't work. The net result then was a shift in hundreds of billions of dollars to the vaccine companies and their investors. So we have this situation where, you know, there's no public health basis to this orthodox public health. There's no scientific basis to what happened. So you have to look further. And it's a push to change society to a very different sort of fascist or feudalistic structure. A technocratic structure. A technocratic structure, which has tried in the 20s and 30s and is being tried again. And, you know, greed is a normal human trait

and it's very strong in all of us if we don't control it. And greed means you want to take stuff from other people for yourself and your betterment of yourself and maybe your family. If you have individuals who start to get the wealth of whole countries, which we've had over the last few decades, then this normal human trait will allow them to use those tools, which is enough money to buy governments and to buy media and to buy the software companies who will control the public discourse. You will use that for something like what happened with COVID to further increase your wealth because it's hard to find really wealthy people who don't want to

get wealthier. So you envisioning a sort of constant state of health emergency to facilitate this transition? Yes and what we have now this pandemic preparedness agenda which you know people people are thinking COVID has gone away and we're getting back to normal but in the sort of international public health world, that's not the case at all. We're building new institutions, we're expanding institutions, and all the expansion is around pandemic preparedness

and response. In a couple of weeks time, the UN will be, the General Assembly will be releasing a communique on this, which is, in a way, is a classic issue of where the UN is. It's about 30 pages of language around equity and children's rights and the importance of education, et cetera, by the people who've just closed schools in Uganda for two years and put hundreds of millions of children out of school and increased poverty, etc. But within that, it essentially says that we need to stop disinformation, i.e. censor people, that pandemics and health emergencies

are an existential threat and the world has to give more authority to the World Health Organisation in particular and the UN generally to manage this. And the WHO is moving next May they all change international health regulations which most people still aren't aware of but which have force under international law and that they'll be changing those to make them rather than recommendations from the director general of the WHO the countries by signing them will be undertaking to implement these

recommendations so that they were under that essentially making his recommendations the rule that they will follow and they expand the idea of health emergency from demonstrated harm to anything that the World Health Organization or this individual considers a threat. And they expand it even beyond pandemics and viruses to anything like climate change or this one health agenda where anything in the environment or society that could harm human wellbeing in any way can be seen as a public health emergency. So out of that, it puts in place the ability to essentially have a permanent state of emergency, which we're sort of seeing anyway if you look at the media over even the last few months. The state of emergency will allow,

and this is within the international health regulations and the treaty that's going with it. It will allow the essentially mandating things like border closures and quarantine and mass vaccination, required medical examinations, et cetera, of the population. Essentially, the states will do this whenever the director of the World Health Organization says that they should. With these new variants of COVID, you know, Ares and Parola, that's what's out there right now. I am seeing, you know, the am seeing the fear narrative coming back, not nearly as strong.

And I'm just very curious how you view that in light of everything you're talking about right now. I mean, to bring in something as stupid as this, you need fear because it's not rational. It's not rational for us to be terrified of the next virus when we haven't really had a bad one since the 1920s. And even then, most people went through it pretty normally. So it's not rational. You need fear to sort of work on people's minds. Let me just get you to qualify what you said. But that's not what a lot of people think. They think the 1920s was extremely serious. And and they think that COVID actually in the initial waves was actually extremely serious. We know, for instance, in parts of California where they've looked and done audits, the actual mortality reported is 30 or 40 percent lower than the official figures.

We know that early on the way that patients were managed had a significant impact on mortality. So in New York, about 85-90% of people who were intubated didn't get off the ventilator, they died. And that's not surprising if you have frail or old people who have respiratory disease, you intubate them and paralyse them, there's a very high mortality. So part of the mortality is the way that we manage. Part of it is people dying of other reasons. Part of it is people actually dying from COVID, which was a significant disease, but mainly for very old people or quite old people who had other comorbidities such as diabetes, severe obesity etc. So in that high risk group it was a significant disease for the rest of the you know for young college students who are now being locked down again in some

colleges it's less than one in a million healthy college students would be expected to die, and probably significantly less than that. So for the vast majority of the population, it isn't much different than the flu. And if you look at it on a global basis, it was around 1.15%, which is about one and a half per thousand people, probably died with the virus. That shouldn't qualify as a giant health emergency. A number of things went out the window in early 2020. One was in public health, the way that we look at disease burden, and we look at life years lost classically.

Almost everyone in society would agree with this. If a five-year-old child dies of pneumonia or malaria or something like that, they lose 70 years of life. It's a tragedy. If an 85-year-old dies who is already sick, they probably lose six months to a year. It's also a tragedy. But if you're going to put resources into malaria or childhood pneumonia or 85 year old for who's very sick, has six months to live and gets a respiratory virus, where are you going to put your resources? So the bigger burden of disease is in the children.

You would put your resources there. It doesn't mean one life is more important than the other, but you're talking about how can we use resources most effectively. COVID was a real disease. It affected people, some people died from it. We put measures in place that we know will increase poverty. We know that poverty shortens life expectancy. We know that closing clinics that screen for cancer will increase cancer deaths, that's why we screen for cancer, to reduce them. We know that making people scared to go to the hospital when they have a chest pain will increase heart mortality. And we know in other countries that closing the clinics

will increase tuberculosis, malaria, et cetera. So we try to make these balances. We have a relatively minor disease, and we have these major diseases that kill most people. And even during the height of COVID in America, in the United States, cancer and heart disease were killing more people than COVID and at an average younger age. So you don't make them worse to address the minor, the relatively minor issue. We pretended, and the World Health Organisation essentially pretended as well, that the one thing that mattered was this virus. And this virus was doing far less harm than a whole range of other diseases that we normally cope with every day. So yes, in that it was certainly a grossly

exaggerated threat and we have done undoubtedly net harm to health by concentrating on that, which is at the expense of everything else. And the vaccine is an example where the world has spent about $10 billion on trying to vaccinate 70% of the whole world. We spend $3.5 billion every year on malaria. That's it. And it kills over half a million children every year. So in life years lost in disease burden, malaria is far worse than COVID globally, but we're putting three times more resources just in the COVID vaccine, leaving everything else aside. With the pandemic preparedness agenda, so now we're putting in place a system to try to stop the next pandemic, which historically we'd expect in a couple of hundred years'

time perhaps, but we're being told could come at any moment. So the World Health Organisation and the World Bank and others are advocating that we put in about $31.5 billion a year. And $10.5 billion of that will be new money. And we're on the road to this now, and these treaties, it'll be public money. It's taxpayers' money from people who are getting poorer. It's going to fund a huge surveillance network,

which is now being put in place, and every country will be checked every two years, inspected, and there'll be a report on how well... So there's a whole bureaucracy being funded for this. They will find variants because it's normal to find viral variants, it's nature. They will then have the power to say this is a potential threat, so we'll lock down this country or this series of countries, we'll close the borders, we'll impoverish the people, we'll keep them there while we make a 100-day vaccine where billions of dollars are going into the 100-day vaccine program, it'll be mRNA vaccine, will then mandate or coerce

the population to take that as a way of getting out of the lockdowns that we've just put on them so that they can get back to their families, get back to their businesses. So they will take the vaccine and this will put a few hundred billion dollars more in the pockets of these companies who are involved in running this whole network. So it's a sort of self-perpetuating way of concentrating wealth and it's for this very, very small disease burden and it'll be at the expense of all the other public health priorities which actually kill people. But we are being sold this as if this is essential for the future of human society and the human race. Which we have, you know, if you tell a lie enough times, people will believe it. We have white papers from the WHO, from the World

Bank, from the UN, Wellcome Trust and elsewhere that just state categorically in their introductions, pandemics are becoming more frequent and more severe. It's a fallacy. It's wrong. It has no historical basis. It's like we're forgetting, or we're conveniently forgetting, history, public health, epidemiology to some extent. You're saying in the name of some sort of fascist impetus? So how do you explain this? Some people say it's some sort of Marxist takeover. We can fiddle around with words. There are some huge beneficiaries, a relatively small part of society that is benefiting, whereas most are

both being impoverished and losing their basic human rights in the process. It's this tie-in of corporations and government that is doing this, that is running this. And it's funny when we talk about national governments, but as Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum said, he has penetrated, was his word, the cabinets of a whole bunch of countries. And a lot of our leaders now are from the World Economic Forum, Young Global Leaders Program, et cetera. So when we talk about countries now, we're sort of talking about a level of people

who are working together in this corporate club. So, we're seeing with increasing censorship of the media and we're seeing a pushback now in America with the court cases, etc., around what's happened to Google and Facebook and Twitter and so on. And we're seeing this vilification of people in society, you know, pandemic of the unvaccinated and these people killing your grandma, etc. And, okay, these fit the fascist mould. You can find another mode for them to fit but it's useful to put this label on them I think to wait people up make people think about it and you don't use these words lightly but you also you know you don't

avoid them if it's in front of your face you have to sort of call a spade a spade as we say in Australia and if we start doing that, then we can start trying to undo what's happening. So is that for what it is and acting on it somehow? Acting on it, yeah, exactly. Acting on it can mean a number of things. It can start by just not complying with stupidity. This working relies on people putting on a mask whenever they're told to, which you know shows their compliance. You know if you walk down the street where everyone's masked you think very differently than if you

walk down the street where you can see people smiling. So if you put on a mask at the door of a restaurant and you take it off at the table you know that's an idiotic thing to do. You're just showing that you're complying with the authority of these people who just made hundreds of billions of dollars out of your increasing poverty. So you can do that or you can say, I'm not going to do that. You know, I'm a sovereign individual. The government's there to serve me in the end at my behest and not to tell me what to do.

You know, fascist and totalitarian regimes, they rely on compliance in order to work. But from the public health point of view, people who have... You know, my profession, we've got to go back to looking objectively at disease burden, looking at history, at the basics of immunology 101, etc. If you impoverish people, you shorten life expectancy, you increase mortality.

This is very well demonstrated. We know that if you damage economies, that you increase mortality, and especially in low-income countries. But we have done this. I mean, we've pushed girls into child marriage. We've increased child labor. We've done all sorts of things over the last few years. We know that they're all very harmful from a public health

point of view. So we're sort of coping with it by putting out these memos that say equity and inclusion and make it look as if we're thinking of that. But at the very same time we're putting in these policies for a putative virus or a current variant, which we know will make this far worse and which don't hold up from the point of view of disease burden. So the reason this is happening is because this is where the money is in global health. It's in pandemic preparedness and it's there because the people who are managing the whole system will gain from that in the long run.

But almost everyone doing it knows that this doesn't make sense. People who are managing the whole system will gain from that in the long run, but almost everyone doing it knows that this doesn't make sense. They should know the history of public health doing this before and where that has led historically. Effectively, are you saying that the WHO is the hub of some sort of global command and control system? I mean the WHO I think mainly is a tool. It's not an organisation trying to take over the world. It's being used by people who want to do that for their own benefit. So if you look at how the organisation should work, it should be there to convene meetings between countries, facilitate exchange of ideas and exchange of information and where countries

ask for help, it's there to help. China has 1.3 billion people, it's the largest chunk of the world's population, so it should have a significant influence, fairly if you look at the population size. so should India, so should sub-Saharan Africa should be a large part of that, etc. But that's completely different than having an organisation that can direct and can tell people in the country that they should be locked down, they should be mandated a vaccine, etc.

That is a sovereignty issue and the WHO and the UN shouldn't even be there in the first place. If we look at the WHO, it is significantly funded by private interests. The second largest funder is private of the organisation and that funder has significant pharma investments, etc. So clearly there's a conflict of interest. You wouldn't want that entity deciding on, you know, who should have what drug in a country. It's funded by certain countries, and, you know, it's the United States and Germany, the big ones, who are very big in the drug industry.

And nearly all of their funding and all the private funding is directed which means they don't give it to the WHO so the WHO can decide what's best for the world. They give it to the WHO to do a specific task that they say and it will even come to you employ these people, you'll have these meetings in these places. So it's very directed funding and the WHO is just a tool that they're using with their funding to get something which they want. That can be good, it can be bad. But again, you would not let that organisation in a democratic society have any power over your people. It

would be completely irrational to do that. A country like the US has far more expertise on infectious disease within its borders, obviously, than the bureaucracy and the WHO, which, you know, you're not there just because you're an expert. It's not a pool of expertise. It's a pool of bureaucrats who are there to manage coordination of certain aspects of health internationally.

So again, it wouldn't make, and if you look at their track record over COVID and the changes and, you know, even not't make, and if you look at their track record over COVID and the changes and even not understanding immunity, apparently, not understanding how masks work, not understanding that the virus was almost all in old people and not in young people, not understanding that if you close schools and massively damage the education of hundreds of millions of children, you'll push them further into poverty and so have bad health effects on them and on their country. If you don't understand that, you've proven that you're not competent to give public health

instruction to countries. So again, it's completely illogical to go down the path we are going at the moment, where we give more power to this organisation to tell to and control over our own health policy. Well, Dr. David Bell, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thanks, Jan. Thank you all for joining Dr. David Bell and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.