The World Health Organization appears in these episodes less as a subject in its own right than as one institution among several whose handling of a public health emergency is treated with suspicion. In the earliest of the three, Theodore Dalrymple names it as a participant in what he describes as a concerted effort to keep the origin of Haiti’s cholera epidemic from becoming known. In the second, Jeffrey Tucker cites it as one of the bodies that overreacted to the coronavirus. In the third, Dr. Jeffrey Singer treats a WHO-approved document as a model for what an acceptable vaccination certificate might look like. The organization is thus invoked both as an object of distrust and, in one narrow instance, as a source of legitimacy.
The Haiti cholera outbreak
Dalrymple’s account begins with a journal article about the cholera epidemic in Haiti and the hope of a new cholera vaccine. He notes that the article states cholera was unknown in Haiti until 2010, and asks why the article did not say how it arrived, given that cholera is a 19th-century disease and Haiti has many diseases of its own Theodore Dalrymple on Negligence and Unaccountability (2019). His surmise, as he labels it, is that cholera was brought by Nepalese peacekeeping troops who came from a country experiencing a cholera epidemic, and whose sewage was poured directly into the water supply of a large part of Haiti. He gives the death toll as unknown but between 10,000 and 80,000, with possibly about 10% of the entire population suffering from cholera.
Dalrymple then turns to why the origin went unmentioned. His answer is that the journal itself, together with the CDC, The Lancet, and the World Health Organization, conspired for quite a long time to prevent it being known that the peacekeeping troops had brought cholera to Haiti. He qualifies this immediately: he says they did not do it deliberately and that no one would accuse them of that, but that it was something they wished to hush up. He adds that the New England Journal did not cover itself in glory in this episode, and concludes that they did not really want anyone to dwell on where the disease came from or why the journals and other organizations had not mentioned it Theodore Dalrymple on Negligence and Unaccountability (2019).
The passage is notable for the way the accusation is framed. Dalrymple offers the claim as his own surmise rather than as documented fact, and he explicitly withholds the charge of deliberate intent even as he names the organizations. The WHO is listed alongside the CDC and two medical journals, not singled out.
Coronavirus and the reliability of data
In the February 2020 episode, the WHO enters through Tucker’s discussion of the fatality rate. Drawing on the health economist George Dehner of the University of Michigan, Tucker explains that the fatality rate is calculated by dividing the number of known deaths by the number of known cases, and that the coronavirus appeared at that point to have a rate of about 3%, roughly like the flu pandemic in 1918 Big government can’t save us from coronavirus (2020). He then poses the counterfactual: if there were 100,000 Chinese citizens with mild infections not coming to medical attention, the fatality rate would fall to about 0.02%, identical to seasonal flu deaths. It is in this context that he says it would be an extreme reaction to start quarantining whole towns, have a nationwide panic, and have the World Health Organization freak out about it when the disease is, as far as was known, no more or less serious than the flu.
The WHO here is one item in a list of overreactions, grouped with town quarantines and public panic. Tucker’s broader argument in the episode is that government quarantine powers are easy to abuse and will be abused, and that the data driving the response — much of it coming from China — is unreliable. He describes a distance thermometer used in China, which he calls pseudo-science, and says false diagnoses with such tools are infamous. Bob Zadek draws the parallel to the TSA, calling the thermometer “health theater” and citing a 95% failure rate at TSA alongside what he calls a probable 95% failure rate with the tool Big government can’t save us from coronavirus (2020).
Tucker also invokes the history of quarantine as a demographic instrument, saying there would have been no forcing of Jews into ghettos in World War II if quarantine powers had not existed, and that the Nazi powers were entirely based on the idea of quarantine. Zadek had raised the Japanese internment during World War II and the internment of Chinese nationals at the end of the 19th century as precedents for using disease fears as an outlet for racial bias. Tucker also cites the Diamond Princess, where 400 Americans were quarantined on a ship with sick people for two weeks, and the CDC’s published plans for quarantining any element of the US population that the president wants to quarantine, including a $1,000 fine for those who successfully resist being taken Big government can’t save us from coronavirus (2020).
Vaccine passports and the yellow card
The April 2021 episode brings the WHO back in a different role. Zadek opens by saying that as a libertarian he jumps immediately from vaccine passports to ID cards and “show me your papers,” and to the darkest parts of Western cultural and military history. He asks Dr. Jeffrey Singer what vaccine passports are, what their public health use is, and whether they are imminent Vaccines & the Totalitarian Principle (2021).
Singer answers that he hopes the question becomes moot as herd immunity is reached, noting that only one virus has ever been eradicated in human history — smallpox, whose last case was in 1977 after 200 years of effort — and that viruses tend to evolve toward less deadly forms. He then distinguishes between two kinds of documentation. The first is the yellow vaccination certificate card, which he says has been around for decades, which he himself carries, and which he has had to show when traveling to parts of the world where yellow fever is endemic. That card, he says, is approved by the World Health Organization and the Department of Health and Human Services, and records the date of vaccination, the vaccine, a lot number, and a stamp from his doctor. He says he does not see that as invasive, because he owns the information and it stays with him Vaccines & the Totalitarian Principle (2021).
The second is a centralized government database controlling vaccination information, with a QR code downloaded to a smartphone. Singer lists his objections: the need for other vital information to locate a person in the database, vulnerability to hacking, the loss of privacy at every place the code is used, an equity problem because not everybody has a smartphone, and the likelihood that such a system evolves into a way to track people throughout the country, leaving a digital trail everywhere. He says a skeptically healthy libertarian would hear the assurance of no such intention and still know these things have a way of evolving into that. He notes that the cards currently issued at vaccination are being sold on the black market and can be easily forged, and suggests something akin to a printed boarding pass, whose barcode contains only a couple of identifiers confirming identity and payment. He mentions that Israel came up with something called a green certificate, reported in the New York Times earlier in March, but that Israeli libertarian friends told him people had stopped using it and started ignoring it Vaccines & the Totalitarian Principle (2021).
Across episodes
The three episodes do not develop a single argument about the WHO so much as place it in three different positions. In the 2019 episode Dalrymple names it as a party to an alleged suppression of information about the origin of Haiti’s cholera epidemic, alongside the CDC and two journals. In the 2020 episode Tucker names it as one of the institutions that overreacted to the coronavirus, in a discussion otherwise focused on quarantine powers and unreliable data. In the 2021 episode Singer cites its approval of the yellow vaccination card as part of the case for a decentralized, personally held certificate over a centralized database. What changes between the earlier and later treatments is the valence: the organization moves from accused suppressor to overreacting body to, in one narrow respect, a stamp of legitimacy. No guest in these excerpts defends the WHO’s conduct in the Haiti episode or the coronavirus response.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the World Health Organization’s structure, founding, membership, budget, or governance, and they do not name any WHO official. They do not state when the organization was founded or what its stated mission is. The Haiti discussion does not identify the journal Dalrymple is describing, the specific article, or the mechanism by which the alleged suppression was carried out. The coronavirus discussion does not say what specific WHO actions or statements Tucker has in mind when he says the organization freaked out, and the vaccine passport discussion does not say whether any government adopted a WHO-approved certificate for COVID-19.