Documentary TrustWHO reviewed by Lead Writer & Principal Researcher Carl J. Kieck on behalf of the Carl J. Kieck International Research Group in Society and Education:
Documentary film “TrustWHO” (2016/2018) wants to know exactly that in the form of a question from the officials of the UN-affiliated agency: Can the World Health Organisation be entrusted with providing objective and incorruptible Public Health guidance to the world?
In one of the many minor skirmishes surrounding the lackluster and unprepossessing response of the World Health Organisation (WHO) to the Wuhan Virus pandemic crisis and almost predictably leading to the silencing of a much needed independent voice, a little known recent documentary “TrustWHO” (US release: 2018) became a victim of what may perhaps be dubbed ‘deletion culture’, in imitation of so-called ‘Cancel or Cancellation Culture’, from Vimeo’s ‘Big Technology’ platform.
This is, yet again, another indubitably infuriating example of the breaching of basic universal free speech principles, embedded within the unspoken underlying conventions ensuring the survival of democratic society, which is likely to rightly have infelicitous consequences for Vimeo and others like it in the future. With accountability being virtually non-existent for the one-sided verdicts of these Big Tech Cyber thugs, the decision to seal the producers’ fate was followed by the issuance of - nothing more, nothing less - than a bland standard notice which unceremoniously lumped Lilian Franck (producer, narrator, author & director) and Thomas Schlottman (co-producer & local director: Japan) together with peddlers of conspiracy theories or purveyors of ‘Fake News’, i.e. in terms of the vague and officious wording, for ‘allegedly making false and misleading claims’ or ‘questioning the efficacy of vaccines’.
Almost needless to articulate, this is nonsensical and inexpressibly unwarrantable in the case of a documentary project which allows representatives of the organisation it investigates to have ample opportunities to provide 'their side of the story’. The film, at full length or in a shorter edited version (most recently in the latter incarnation available on Al Jazeera), is still available if you know where to look (see suggested LINKS below), and, therefore, in short, here’s why you should make a point of supporting Franck and Schlottman and freedom of speech in the cinematic sphere by fitting the movie into your viewing schedule:
Released originally in 2016 (in Europe), the documentary takes a look at the borderline hubristic attitude displayed by the WHO as it conducts its activities and, in some instances, becomes embroiled in controversies. In relation to the latter point, it apparently has a well-documented internal, long-term predisposition to conceal these when they occur.
To the world, the WHO presents something of a façade, one based on the idea that a United Nations-related agency with a remit such as this one, has an essentially altruistic function. The formal relationship between the UN and the WHO entails that the latter performs as a specialised agency with responsibility for international public health, an obligation of staggering proportions. In reality, behind the otherwise beneficent medicalised surgical mask, it has increasingly been relying on canvassing for funding, hosting expensive champagne-fuelled soirees for corporate partners and NGOs, whilst the organisation is straight-jacketed by the statutory limitations on its funding formula.
Only 30% of its income, contributions from governments around the world, is safe or “assured” in the phraseology of former Director-General Margaret Chan, also called ‘assessed contributions’ like the membership dues of a club. The remaining 70% of what could in everyday phraseology be termed ‘donations’ or other ‘endowments’, is often derived from problematic initiatives arriving with ‘spending strings attached’.
In this way, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the most controversial philanthropical foundations in the world, has become the largest donor in the category of ‘voluntary’ contributors, matching the ‘voluntary’ contribution of the United States which also coughs up a sizeable assessed contribution every year. Like other, comparable benefactors in its category, Gates money may only be used for programmes earmarked by the donors themselves. It’s moreover instructive to compare the virtually negligible ‘voluntary’ contribution made by China to that of the US, only 2.3% as compared to a 28% stake in the total stash of Voluntary Funds.
Additionally, the WHO has morphed into the kind of self-promoting and thin-skinned bureaucratic monstrosity often portrayed in popular fiction and ridiculed in recent political invective by both popular and populist media:
It is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, one of the most expensive and luxurious cities in the world; it employs more than 7 000 people with often questionable credentials, motivations and associations; moreover, there are six larger regional offices and beyond that no fewer than another hundred-and-fifty offices, therefore, pandering to most of the member states of the UN.
Apart from being troubled by finances as well as outside influences and impositions of various kinds, the WHO ostensibly doesn’t take kindly to criticism from within either. A former employee at the Geneva HQ, who was one of the first staff association representatives there, lost her role after this was made redundant. What makes this all the more curious is that shortly before the abolition of her job, she had been central to organising not even a full-blown strike, but a go-slow in order to protest corruption and nepotism in the agency.
As for the approach taken by TrustWHO, it wisely narrows its focus on events unfolding over the last two decades, approaching its elusive quarry by systematically reviewing different initiatives in areas as diverse as the following outlined below:
Smoking-related health initiatives and how these have been torpedoed by large tobacco companies; the role of industry and pharmaceutical companies in attempts to monitor and infiltrate the decisions of the organisation; and, as a consequence, niggling conflict of interest issues that have arisen through public health ‘experts’ fulfilling consultative roles for both industry and the WHO at the same time.
Two broad, contested and troubling areas resorting under WHO supervision, globally, provide circumstances and events for much more serious contemplation, i.e. (a) disease/s or deaths caused by radiation, and, (b) pandemics:
Intriguingly, the effects and associated dangers of nuclear radiation as at the Fukushima disaster in the last decade, it emerges, have neither been communicated fully to locals nor to the rest of the world. In the case of the Japanese incident, it seems, children especially are developing thyroid lumps, in a minority of cases cancerous, and neither the government (actually, two administrations since the incident) nor the WHO has succeed in acknowledging responsibility.
Readers will also be interested to know that the exact indirect death toll for the Chernobyl incident remains a medical bone of contention. The WHO has been central to denying the varying claims of independent studies relating to high fatality rates, but in one case, there has seemingly been an attempt to repress claims of around a million fatalities, calculated on a world-wide scale (i.e. the nuclear plume circumnavigated the entire northern hemisphere’s atmosphere).
In the second area inviting much more serious opportunity to pause, one with consummate relevance and pertinence to the recent and ongoing COVID-19 challenges, the WHO emerges as an organisation with a pandemic disaster planning and scenario projection judgment deficit bordering on the ludicrous:
Like many bureaucratic organisations, it first deploys befuddling semantics, then becomes entrapped in its details, especially when the central concepts thereof have to be periodically revised. At the time of the swine flu ‘pandemic’ (2009-), a redefinition of the concept was deemed necessary, the worst possible timing for anyone aspiring to keeping guidance transparent, worst of all by decoupling the death rate as a contributing factor from actuality on the ground and rendering the distinction between successive phases of severity much more difficult.
In a predictably maladroit way, the situation was exacerbated when at the time any guidance whatsoever as to what constituted a pandemic disappeared from the WHO’s web-pages.
If you still feel outraged about the misconceived prognostications made by the likes of Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysus on behalf of the world’s leading health authority relating to the COVID period, compare your exasperation with those who took the advice at the time of the H1N1 pandemic outbreak seriously.
Global audiences were informed that as many as two billion people could become infected, underwritten by WHO advice, prominently displayed, and a long-term advisor to the organisation wagered that the fatality rate could become as high as 50%. For the sake of objective perspective, consider that Germany with a population of almost ninety million only registered 255-8 deaths during the 'Great Swine Flu Pandemic' of 2009.
Until the release of TrustWHO, there had been very few longer documentary inquiries available into the agency’s multifarious global activities and involvements, and anyone reading this review would still be facing difficulties to find something sustaining such a fact-finding quest by, for instance, going to a logical and obvious first option such as YouTube.
TrustWHO fills an important gap for both individuals and audiences who wish to form an idea of the nature and scope of the WHO in the early Twenty-first century. Although perhaps somewhat over-ambitious in setting out its quest by considering so many complex and intricate issues all at the same time, the recommended full version rather than the shorter edited version at around one hour and twenty-five minutes succeeds adequately.
By highlighting what the main concerns have been, to date, regarding the WHO and offering many essential points quickly ripening and beckoning with the remembrance thereof as possibilities for further pursuit in the quest for answers about the bumbling and ostensibly China-centric response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the documentary has probably positioned itself as perhaps the groundbreaking project in its sub-genre or niche of the global public health documentary.
The producers, reacting to the removal of the documentary from Vimeo (as a pay-for-viewing option), have announced that they have a follow-up project called CORONA.film in the works. One would fervently hope that they will endeavour to concentrate in this keenly anticipated follow-up on the recent backstory to China’s central, manipulative involvement with the organisation during the recent pandemic.
China’s increasingly key global role is entirely omitted from the first film as a fundamental concern. The evident shortcomings displayed by it (i.e. WHO) when it comes to the handling of pandemic situations and its perplexing relationship with China need to be brought together in the new project if it is going to have any plangent credibility as a filmic investigation and critique befitting a sorely taxed trans-national agency at the outset of the second decade of the Twenty-first century.
TrustWHO’s subject matter of an increasingly adrift World Health Organisation, which anticipates the Corona-virus pandemic by a only a few years is, to use an appropriate extended (ill-)health metaphor, symptomatic of a period in politics where confidence in most institutions has taken a battering, repeatedly so, without positive or improving results.
Global organisations often appear to be politicised and therefore globalist, into an unwanted bargain for the ordinary man and woman, with little opportunity of recall, remedy or intervention. This impression of unaccountability beyond structures or processes that facilitate elective determination or limitations to their scope, outcomes, objectives and performance, is compounded by questionable associations, objectionable practices, as well as unearned power and entitlement beyond the dreams of most ordinary citizens around the world facing unprecedented millennial challenges.
Other than the Herculean task of trying to prove itself to be still relevant and effective in terms of the current Public Health emergency, it remains to be seen if the WHO can survive the current era of a growing phenomenon of populist politics manifesting itself in the form of radical, unpredictable changes and an intractable milieu of international relations hinging on seismic geopolitical divisions verging on a new Cold War.
References & Bibliography:
“TrustWHO?” (2016 & 2018)
Length: Approximately 1 hour 25 minutes
Cinematographic Information:
Director & Writer: Lilian Franck (with Thomas Schlottmann)
Narrator: Lilian Franck
Link to documentary:
BitChute:
Recommended:
Reaction of Producers to removal of documentary from Vimeo platform:
Carl J. Kieck International Research Group:
Lead Writer & Principal Researcher:
Carl J. Kieck
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