By David Bell at Brownstone dot org.

Much has been written on the amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR), which most countries are making themselves subject to after July 19 (next week). Many raise concerns of loss of sovereignty, censorship, corporate greed, and conflict of interest. But most are missing the main point; the sheer and outright stupidity and fallacy on which the whole pandemic agenda is based.

July 19 is the last day that Member States of the World Health Organization (WHO) can withdraw from the IHR amendments (without entering a multi-year withdrawal process). By failing to withdraw, they will be committing their taxpayers to fund the key surveillance aspects of a rapidly expanding industry that is the pandemic industrial complex.

They will be required to set up an extensive network to search for well-established natural phenomena, including the tendency of viruses to mutate into variants. This has been part of the natural world for hundreds of millions of years, but demonstrating it has recently become highly profitable due to a confluence of technological advances and intense marketing.

Firstly, we have developed the ability to detect variants with technologies such as PCR and gene sequencing. This also helps find a lot of viruses that we had not noticed before as they are mostly harmless. Secondly, we have developed digital identification and communications technologies that allow an unprecedented level of mass media coordination and public coercion - what Goebbels could do on a national scale, we can now do almost globally.

Thirdly, we have developed pay-to-print modified-RNA medicines (vaccines) that are really cheap but, through the use of fear and coercion, can be injected into almost everyone, returning excellent profits.

The text of the IHR amendments reads fairly innocuously. Few countries will decline their adoption. The people making the decisions often have career interests in the pandemic industry anyway, and politicians don't see much gain in standing against the flow of finance. This will flow upward, as it did in Covid, but some of it diverts to their electoral funds. Most think it is better that they get these funds than their opponents.

Unfortunately, but obviously, modern democracies are very much about money.

Politics aside, it is worth considering how we got to such a place. The last big natural pandemic was the Spanish flu in 1918-19. That was before we invented any modern antibiotics (most flu deaths were probably from secondary bacterial infections) and before all the gizmos and cleverness of modern medicine. Since then, infectious disease death rates have plummeted because we eat better, have better sanitation and live in better conditions, have modern clinics, and all that technology provides.

If the Spanish flu spread now, it is inconceivable that an equivalent virus could cause the same pattern of mortality, unless we really wanted it to. A century of advances in medical technology and human resilience do not amount to anything, as many medical authorities gaining from this would have us believe.

Moderate flu pandemics in the late 1950s and 1960s were the only events since then where a respiratory virus outbreak actually got significantly above baseline for annual mortality (Swine flu [H1N1] in 2009 didn't). Then came Covid-19, associated with death in wealthy countries at just above the average age of death, and quite probably arising from the research carried out by the same pandemic industry that then profited from it.

This leaves a huge credibility problem in justifying the pandemic agenda that now dominates public health. It is being dealt with by pummeling the public, and politicians, with stories sufficiently farcical that they start to be believed. We still have an urge to believe that institutions such as the WHO, the World Bank, and the G20 would not make stuff up to trick us.

Undaunted by the lack of evidence, the WHO set about essentially creating a...