The World Health Organisation came under fire as zealous right-wing African members of Parliament, including some of the continent’s most vociferous anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQI lawmakers, united with anti-vax conspiracy theorists at a conference hosted in Uganda recently.
The African Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family Values and Sovereignty also gave a platform to a speaker who claimed that various vaccines were unnecessary, and designed to reduce African fertility – including the Covid-19, Human Papillomavirus (HPV), malaria and even tetanus vaccines.
Others slammed the WHO pandemic agreement currently being negotiated, describing it as a “power grab” aimed at imposing abortion, same-sex marriage and lockdowns on the world, writes Kerry Cullinan in Daily Maverick.
The anti-vax charge was led by Kenyan doctor Wahome Ngare and South African Shabnam Mohamed, who describes herself as a lawyer and journalist.
Ngare is chairperson of the African Sovereignty Coalition and a director of the right-wing Kenya Christian Professionals Forum.
Mohamed is a leader of an “Africa chapter” of US presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr’s Children’s Health Defence, one of the key global sources of vaccine misinformation.
She is also part of the so-called World Council on Health, an alliance of anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and alternative health providers.
Link to US anti-vaxxers
Ngare told the conference that SARS-CoV2 was produced in a laboratory and the “endgame of the whole Covid fiasco was to vaccinate everybody” for profit, and that the tetanus vaccine causes infertility.
He also claimed that vaccines against HPV and malaria were unnecessary.
“Could the Covid pandemic have been created and designed to facilitate the administration of an injection aimed at reducing one population through sterility and death?” asked Ngare, who also claimed that the WHO had been involved for 20 years in developing a tetanus vaccine that prevents pregnancy.
Ngare urged African MPs to ensure their governments reject the proposed amendments to the WHO’s International Health Regulations (IHR), which he claimed would turn the WHO “from an advisory organisation into a governing body”.
The actual aim of the IHR amendments is to ensure there is a clear process for responding to “public health emergencies of international concern to ensure the world is better prepared for the next pandemic”.
Disinformation list
The goal of the pandemic agreement is for the WHO’s 194 member countries to be better equipped to prevent, prepare for, and respond to future pandemics, including more equitable access to vaccines and medicines.
However, Mohamed provided a list of disinformation about the pandemic agreement – currently in draft form.
In particular, she highlighted the proposed pathogen access and benefit-sharing (Pabs) system, which aims to establish a global system for countries to share biological and genomic information about pathogens with the potential to trigger pandemics, and derive benefits for doing so, like getting access to medicines and vaccines.
Under the current draft, the WHO will get 20% of any health-related pandemic products – including vaccines and medicine – to distribute to the neediest countries and groups, in efforts to avoid avoid vaccine hoarding.
Mohamed believes this Pabs system will encourage “biological weapon research” and “dangerous experimentation”.
She also claimed that “South Africa has drawn up a Bill to withdraw from the WHO” (she and several MPs from the African Christian Democratic Party are behind a Bill which has not been tabled in Parliament).
The ACDP is vehemently against Covid vaccines and supports Ivermectin as a Covid treatment.
Dr Seyoum Teklemariam Antonios, Africa director of the US anti-rights group Family Watch International, told the conference that the pandemic agreement and “transgender healthcare guidelines” pose serious threats to Africa’s growth and development, and asked Uganda’s leaders to prevent its representatives at the upcoming WHO Assembly (WHA) from signing these treaties.
No transgender healthcare guidelines are on the agenda at the WHA.
WHO advances health equity
“The WHO’s leadership in public health, technical expertise and support in disease prevention has significantly advanced health equity and accessibility, fostering global solidarity during times of crisis,” said Tian Johnson, strategist for the African Alliance, a Pan-African health justice organisation.
“The co-ordinated campaign to undermine the agency’s global and African work demands a robust response. We must actively resist, advocate for, and confront the far-right groups seeking to propagate hatred, division and violence on our continent.”
During the pandemic, a disparate range of organisations and individuals, particularly in the US, spread various conspiracy theories, including that the pandemic was intentionally created as part of a plan by secretive elites to control the world population through lockdowns and quarantines.
The Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found that just 12 people were responsible for two-thirds of anti-vax information on Facebook and Twitter at the height of the pandemic in 2021. Nine of the “disinformation dozen” derived their livelihoods from the “alternative health” sector.
In April 2023, the Heritage Foundation, a far-right US think tank, launched Project 2025: The Presidential Transition Project, consisting of policy proposals and a recruitment strategy to ensure the takeover of all government offices and entities should Donald Trump be re-elected.
The proposals, in a 920-page book, include the demand that vaccines “tested on aborted foetal cells” should be removed from US supplies. The WHO is mentioned several times, always negatively.
Globally, the frenzied dis- and misinformation about the WHO’s pandemic agreement reached a crescendo this month, apparently to coincide with the supposed deadline of the pandemic agreement negotiations.
WHO spokesperson Paul Garwood said his organisation was “concerned about the impact ….on people’s well-being and health choices but we are limited in what we can do as a technical agency”.
Cullinan is deputy editor of the Geneva-based Health Policy Watch.
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US anti-vax doctor starts prison sentence for Capital Riots break-in
UN approves global accord on pandemic response
Anti-vaccine chiropractors: A rising force of misinformation
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