A new campaign to persuade the world the WHO would never lie “could not be more wrong”.
As mentioned in the last post at Copwatch, the World Health Organization launched a new initiative on X (formerly known as Twitter) on January 8th to counter “misinformation”.
To say this is breathtaking for its chutzpah would be an understatement. Described as “Busting myths and setting the record straight about WHO”, it is designed to let the world know that the WHO is very misunderstood by those who believe its plans for a pandemic treaty are sinister. After all, the WHO would never lie, oh no! It is merely an honest broker of information and only a conspiracy theorist could think otherwise.
That would be all very well if the WHO had not been caught by X’s Community Notes system lying the big one on at least sixteen different occasions about vaping.
In fact, Dr. Michael Siegel of the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine at the Tufts University School of Medicine, who has published nearly 70 papers related to tobacco after more than three decades of his career in tobacco control, picked out a WHO tweet as the “most egregious statement about electronic cigarettes in 2024.”
The WHO tweet claimed that “Q: What looks cute, smells good, but is designed to kill?
A: A vape!”. Dr Siegel chose this tweet “because it is the exact opposite of the truth. It could not be more wrong.”
We know this because the person who invented e-cigarettes is on record saying as much. Hon Lik described at Reuters in 2015 how he planned to help himself quit smoking – and therefore not die – by inventing the vapes we know today. Just before his father died from lung cancer in 2004, he had created a device which could deliver nicotine without killing the user. “I believed that if I could use vapor to simulate cigarette smoke, this could help me,” he explained.
The WHO incorrectly claimed that vapes are “designed to kill” despite knowing very well that this was the ultimate in misinformation. If the WHO truly wanted to “[set] the record straight about the WHO” it would have to concede that it deliberately lies to achieve its aims. If it truly wanted to “bust myths” about the WHO it would be telling the world that its word can never be trusted based on how it conducts its corrupt tobacco control treaty.
Because this is what the evidence clearly shows us, and the WHO shows no sign of changing course.
People are often judged – and should be – by their actions rather than what they say. Perhaps the WHO would be more believed by those who are suspicious of its motives for a pandemic treaty if it weren’t deliberately lying in many areas of policy. As things stand, the world would trust the wolf in the fable of the Three Little Pigs before it believes in a World Health Organization which is content to blatantly lie to get its own way.