An Insider’s Analysis of the World Health Organization’s $31 Billion Pandemic Plan—Garrett Brown
American Thought Leaders
The Epoch Times
4.9 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 24 April 2023
⏱️ 43 minutes
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Summary
“Global health governance is not fit for purpose, and it doesn’t represent a vast majority of global needs and wants and desires, and people on the ground and what’s going to affect them. It gets captured.”
Today I sit down with Garrett Brown, professor of global health policy at the University of Leeds. Brown has been working on strengthening health systems in the African context for decades.
“You can talk about rights and freedoms, but none of those matter if you don’t have good health. You can’t exercise any of those things,” he says. “It’s a fundamental part of what it means to be human and have any minimally decent life.”
Brown and his research team were recently hired by the World Health Organization to determine whether its $31.1 billion plan for pandemic preparedness and response was justifiable, or even feasible.
“The worry is that if you’re asking nations to pony up roughly $26 billion, where are they going to find that money? They’re going to find it from existing programs,” says Brown. “Indonesia has just basically suspended their polio program and moved those human resources into vaccines.”
Brown is troubled by the high cost of the WHO’s pandemic plan, which would require resources for basic health to decrease by 34 percent, and basic nutrition by 10 percent.
“We saw this with malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, AIDS, reproductive health—that resources were being shifted from certain national budget lines into pandemic preparedness,” says Brown.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Global health governance is not fit for purpose and it doesn't represent a vast majority |
| 0:06.0 | of global needs and wants and desires and people on the ground and what's going to affect them and you |
| 0:10.8 | get captured. Today I sit down with Garrett Brown, professor of Global Health Policy at the University |
| 0:16.5 | of Leeds. You can talk about rights and freedoms but none of those matter if you don't have good health. |
| 0:21.3 | It's a fundamental part of what it means to be human and have any minimally decent life. |
| 0:26.3 | Brown and his research team were hired by the World Health Organization to determine whether |
| 0:31.2 | it's 31.1 billion dollar plan for pandemic preparedness and response was justifiable or even feasible. |
| 0:39.0 | The worry is that if you're asking nations to pony a roughly 26 billion, where are they going |
| 0:45.2 | to find that money? They're going to find it from existing programs. Indonesia is just basically |
| 0:49.7 | suspended their polio program and moved those human resources into vaccines. And we saw this |
| 0:55.2 | with malaria tuberculosis, HIVAs. Resources were being shifted from certain national budget lines |
| 1:02.0 | into pandemic preparedness. This is American Thought Leaders and I'm Janja Kelley. |
| 1:08.9 | Garrett Brown, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you. Thank you for having me. |
| 1:14.6 | Garrett, you run a research group at the University of Leeds that provides quite a bit of information |
| 1:22.4 | to the WHO. In your unique role, you have a view into how this very opaque system, at least to |
| 1:33.2 | me, operates. And so here we are. We're going to take a look. But for starters, how do you end up |
| 1:39.6 | being someone that provides this profound pandemic research information to a group like the WHO? |
| 1:48.0 | So in early days of the pandemic, I wrote a piece for the BMJ, which is a British medical journal, |
| 1:55.5 | sort of suggesting that we have five paradigm failures in the way we're thinking about the pandemic. |
| 2:02.7 | And that was read by the head of evidence and analytics at the WHO. And he said, well, we're trying |
| 2:09.0 | to think of a different way of approaching these things. My unit, would you look over some stuff for |
| 2:14.0 | me. And then I said, well, I think we need evidence this better. And so he invited me to do that. |
... |
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