by David Bell, Childrens Health Defense:
About 500 people died from mpox in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) this year, over 80% of them under age 15. In that same period, about 40,000 people in DRC, mostly children under age 5, died from malaria.
The mpox emergency
The World Health Organization (WHO) acted as expected last week and declared mpox a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC).
So, a problem in a small number of African countries that has killed about the same number of people this year as die every four hours from tuberculosis has come to dominate international headlines. This is raising a lot of angst from some circles against the WHO.
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While angst is warranted, it is mostly misdirected. The WHO and the International Health Regulations (IHR) emergency committee they convened had little real power — they are simply following a script written by their sponsors.
The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, which declared an emergency a day earlier, is in a similar position.
Mpox is a real disease and needs local and proportionate solutions. But the problem it is highlighting is much bigger than mpox or the WHO, and understanding this is essential if we are to fix it.
Mpox, previously called monkeypox, is caused by a virus thought to normally infect African rodents such as rats and squirrels. It fairly frequently passes to, and between, humans. In humans, its effects range from very mild illness to fever and muscle pains to severe illness with its characteristic skin rash and sometimes death.
Different variants, called “clades,” produce slightly different symptoms. It is passed by close body contact including sexual activity, and the WHO declared a PHEIC two years ago for a clade that was mostly passed by men having sex with men.
The current outbreaks involve sexual transmission but also other close contact such as within households, expanding its potential for harm. Children are affected and suffer the most severe outcomes, perhaps due to issues of lower prior immunity and the effects of malnutrition and other illnesses.
Reality in DRC
The current PHEIC was mainly precipitated by the ongoing outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), though there are known outbreaks in nearby countries covering a number of clades. About 500 people have died from mpox in DRC this year, over 80% of them under 15 years of age.
In that same period, about 40,000 people in DRC, mostly children under 5 years, died from malaria. The malaria deaths were mainly due to lack of access to very basic commodities like diagnostic tests, antimalarial drugs, and insecticidal bed nets, as malaria control is chronically underfunded globally. Malaria is nearly always preventable or treatable if sufficiently resourced.
During this same period in which 500 people died from mpox in DRC, hundreds of thousands also died in DRC and surrounding African countries from tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and the impacts of malnutrition and unsafe water. Tuberculosis alone kills about 1.3 million people globally each year, which is a rate about 1,500 times higher than mpox in 2024.
The population of DRC is also facing increasing instability characterized by mass rape and massacres, in part due to a scramble by warlords to service the appetite of richer countries for the components of batteries. These in turn are needed to support the Green Agenda of Europe and North America.
This is the context in which the people of DRC and nearby populations, which obviously should be the primary decision-makers regarding the mpox outbreak, currently live.
For the WHO and the international public health industry, mpox presents a very different picture. They now work for a pandemic industrial complex, built by private and political interests on the ashes of international public health.
Forty years ago, mpox would have been viewed in context, proportional to the diseases that are shortening overall life expectancy and the poverty and civil disorder that allows them to continue. The media would barely have mentioned the disease, as they were basing much of their coverage on impact and attempting to offer independent analysis.
Now the public health industry is dependent on emergencies. They have spent the past 20 years building agencies such as the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), inaugurated at the 2017 World Economic Forum meeting and solely focused on developing vaccines for pandemics, and on expanding capacity to detect and distinguish ever more viruses and variants.
This is supported by the recently passed amendments to the IHR.
While improving nutrition, sanitation and living conditions provided the path to longer lifespans in Western countries, such measures sit poorly with a colonial approach to world affairs in which the wealth and dominance of some countries are seen as being dependent on the continued poverty of others.
This requires a paradigm in which decision-making is in the hands of distant bureaucratic and corporate masters. Public health has an unfortunate history of supporting this, with restrictions on local decision-making and the pushing of commodities as key interventions.
Thus, we now have thousands of public health functionaries, from the WHO to research institutes to non-government organizations, commercial companies, and private foundations, primarily dedicated to finding targets for Pharma, purloining public funding, and then developing and selling the cure.
The entire newly minted pandemic agenda, demonstrated successfully through the COVID-19 response, is based on this approach. Justification for the salaries involved requires the detection of outbreaks, an exaggeration of their likely impact, and the institution of a commodity-heavy and usually vaccine-based response.
The sponsors of this entire process — countries with large Pharma industries, Pharma investors and Pharma companies themselves — have established power through media and political sponsorship to ensure the approach works.
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