Why the News Promotes Ignorance and Mental Illness

 “News is to the mind what sugar is to the body: appetising, easily digestible and extremely damaging.”   

Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News

Most people think that consuming the news makes one an informed citizen who is equipped to form intelligent opinions on social and political issues. In this video, drawing from the Swiss author Rolf Dobelli’s book Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life, we argue that the opposite is true: news consumption fosters ignorance, intolerance, passivity, and chronic stress.  

“News organisations want you to believe they’re giving you a competitive advantage. Plenty of people fall for this. In fact, consuming the news is far from a competitive advantage; it actively disadvantages you…There’s no question that the dross we’re spoon-fed every day is not only completely worthless but actively damaging.”

Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News

To understand one of the problems with news consumption, we can turn to a well-known set of experiments conducted by psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven Maier in the 1960s. In these studies, rats were subjected to electric shocks. One group could stop the shocks by turning a wheel; the other group had no means of escape. The first group of rats did not display any adverse effects to the shocks, but the rats that were powerless to stop the shocks developed what Seligman and Maier called learned helplessness — which is a condition marked by passivity, reduced motivation, and anhedonia – the inability to feel pleasure. 

In many ways, the news functions like these electric shocks. We are continually bombarded with distressing reports that provoke stress, anxiety, fear, and a sense of hopelessness. Yet instead of turning off the news or taking meaningful action on the issues that concern us, we continue – day after day, year after year – to expose ourselves to this steady stream of negativity. In doing so, we place ourselves in a similar position to the helpless rats and we gradually develop a learned helplessness that insidiously seeps into our personal life. Or as Dobelli writes:    

“…learned helplessness doesn’t just make us passive about what’s on the news…Learned helplessness spills over into every area of our lives. Once the news has made us passive, we tend to behave passively towards our family and our jobs as well – precisely where we do have room for manoeuvre. British media researcher Jodie Jackson takes a similar view: ‘When we tune into the news, we are constantly confronted with unresolved problems and the narrative does not inspire much hope that they will ever be solved.’ It’s no surprise, then, that we feel depressed when we consume the news, which confronts us with problems that are mostly impossible to solve.” 

Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News

Another major problem with news consumption is that it promotes ignorance. Thomas Jefferson recognized this in 1807 when he wrote that:  

“The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them.”   

Thomas Jefferson, Memoirs, Correspondence, Private Letters

One of the reasons the news leaves us less informed is because it radically oversimplifies what it reports on. The world is a complex system, and social, political, and environmental issues are not linear phenomena with one or two clear causes. They are chaotic, non-linear processes shaped by hundreds, if not thousands, of interwoven factors – far beyond the capacity of the human mind to fully comprehend. Yet instead of acknowledging this complexity with intellectual humility and grappling with it through in-depth reporting, the news reduces events to simplistic narratives, sound bites, and catchphrases – which it presents as the truth. In doing so, the news distorts the reality of what it claims to explain. Or as Dobelli writes:    

“Any journalist who writes ‘The market fell because of X’ or ‘The company went bankrupt because of Y’ is either an idiot or trying to pull the wool over their readers’ eyes. True, X and Y may well have had a causal impact, but this is far from proven – and other influences may well have been much more significant…News has to be extremely short even as it tells a story. This can only be done through a brutal process of simplification…Since the news is so telescoped, it’s necessarily a bullshit explanation…In this way consumers are given the illusion that the world is simpler and more explicable than it actually is, and the quality of their decision-making suffers.”   

Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News

To make matters worse, these simplified explanations of social and political events are far from unbiased. Rather, they are filtered through the news outlet’s political agenda and shaped by the interests of government agencies and corporate advertisers. The media entrepreneur Clay Johnson admitted that: “For every reporter in the United States, there are more than four public relations specialists working hard to get them to write what their bosses want them to say.” (Clay Johnson, The Information Diet)  The 20th century American writer Upton Sinclair asked: “When you read your daily paper, are you reading facts or propaganda?” (Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check) Or as Dobelli echoes:   

“These days it’s much harder to distinguish between truthful, unbiased news items and those with an ulterior motive. There’s a vast industry of lobbying and leverage at work behind the scenes.”  

Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News

By concealing its political biases, ulterior motives, and manipulative intentions behind reductive narratives and simplistic explanations that make the world seem far more comprehensible than it is, the news cultivates an intellectual hubris in its consumers. Today, many people hold strong opinions on virtually every issue amplified by the media, and with each new trending news topic, public discourse and social media are flooded with self-assured commentary. In effect, the news is cultivating a population of true believers; that is, individuals who are so convinced they know the truth that they are intolerant and even hateful toward those who hold opposing views. Hence, news consumption deepens societal polarization, erodes the possibility of civic discourse, and turns neighbors who might otherwise be friends into ideological enemies. 

In an age when, thanks in large part to the news, the average citizen is highly opinionated, profoundly ignorant, and increasingly intolerant, the following wisdom of Marcus Aurelius is sorely needed:  

‘You are at liberty not to form opinions about all and sundry, thereby sparing your soul unrest.”   

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Or as Dobelli echoes:    

“…it’s a serious mistake to think we need to form an opinion about everything. Ninety per cent of our opinions are superfluous. Yet the news is constantly urging us to form opinions. This robs us of concentration and inner peace…if you unleash a whirlwind of news on the population, it polarises the public…News and comments about the news bring out the worst in humanity…You only have to read the comments underneath any online article. The hatred you find there is alarming…”    

Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News

Consuming the news also erodes our ability to think deeply and sustain focus. In the past, the amount of news one could consume was limited by the distribution of newspapers or the production of an evening news broadcast. Today, twenty-four-hour news channels, websites, and social media feeds bombard us with a never-ending stream of news headlines that keep our minds in a state of perpetual distraction. According to the Pew Research Center, the average person consumes about 60 news items a day, or 20,000 a year. And as researchers at the University of Tokyo have observed, the greater number of news items one consumes the fewer neurons they have in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region of the brain critical for attention, impulse control, and moral reasoning. And as Dobelli writes:   

“If you watch a news junkie, you’ll see this in action: their concentration span shrinks and they have trouble controlling their emotions…I always notice that the most passionate consumers of the news – even if they were once also passionate bookworms – no longer have the ability to read longer articles or books. After four or five pages they get tired, their attention dissipates, and they get restless. It’s not because they’re getting older or busier. Rather, the physical structure of their brain has changed.”   

Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News

The news also feeds the undercurrents of stress and anxiety that plague modern life. Producers of the news exploit our negativity bias, or our predisposition to react more strongly to negative information than positive, with reports of wars, heinous crimes, riots, political gossip and turmoil, economic instability, potential pandemics and climate catastrophes. Graham Davey, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Sussex University and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Experimental Psychopathology, has demonstrated through his research that the more one consumes news the more stress and anxiety one suffers in daily life. And given that stress inhibits the functioning of our immune system and is implicated in a wide range of disease, we can safely say the news is making us sick. Or as Dobelli writes: 

“…consuming the news reduces your quality of life. You will be more stressed, more on edge, more susceptible to disease, and you’ll die earlier. That’s an especially sad piece of news – but one that does, at least, deserve your attention.”   

Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News

Because the news is so damaging to individual and societal well-being, Dobelli advocates for radical abstinence – cutting the news out of our lives entirely. For those skeptical about giving it up for good, Dobelli suggests we experiment with abstaining from the news for 30 days. During this period, the psychological and emotional benefits of news abstention become apparent and as Dobelli notes, very few who try this experiment will choose to go back. Or as he writes:  

“During the initial stage of abstinence…you’ll have to literally force yourself not to consume any news…So – what should you do if you relapse? The same thing an alcoholic would: simply start again, reinstituting a zero-tolerance policy…For ten years I’ve consistently practised what I preach. The impact on my quality of life and decision-making has been remarkable. Try it. You’ve got nothing to lose. You have so much to gain.”   

Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News

Abstaining from the news does not mean we have to stick our head in the sand and remain ignorant about important social, political, and world events. For we have access to a wide range of informational sources that can help us stay informed without falling prey to the pitfalls of news consumption. Long-form content, such as books, well-researched articles, podcasts, documentaries, textbooks, online courses, and academic journals, offer the depth and nuance needed to do greater justice to the complexity of world events, in a way that the news – with its short-form, oversimplified, biased reporting – cannot.  

“Read books and long articles that do justice to the complexity of the world…After a few months, you’ll be rewarded with a clearer understanding of the world…Long-form pieces are the opposite of the news…Much of their content is valuable, providing new insights and background information. But be careful: these formats are far from a guarantee of relevance.”  

Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News

With a clearer understanding of the world, we are better equipped to act as a genuine force for good in society. Dobelli notes that when he raises the idea of abstaining from the news, many respond with the following concern: If we stop following the news, who will hold the powerful accountable and drive social change? Yet given that the news manipulates public opinion — frequently to the advantage of those in power — and fosters learned helplessness rather than action, it should come as no surprise that “the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Revolutions of 1848, [and] the fall of the Soviet Union… did not need current affairs programmes, news websites or feeds.” (Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News) The most influential figures of these movements informed themselves – and inspired others – through books, pamphlets, public gatherings, speeches, debates, and meaningful conversation. For example, during the American Revolution Thomas Paine’s 47-page pamphlet Common Sense was profoundly influential in sparking revolutionary sentiment in America.   

“How did people stay informed? They thought, and they debated…Is political discourse even possible without the news? This question suggests that one can only form a well-founded opinion via the news media. Yet that isn’t true.” 

Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News

While abstaining from the news can reduce our ignorance and make us more aware of social issues, it also gives us the opportunity to redirect our attention toward what truly matters and what we can influence — our mental and physical health, our relationships, and our work. Two thousand years ago, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus opened his Enchiridion with the timeless insight: “Some things are in our control and others are not.” He went on to teach that peace of mind and a flourishing life depend on investing our time and energy on what lies within our power. And as Dobelli continues: 

“Nintey-nine point nine per cent of all world events are outside your control…Devote your energies to things you can influence. There are more than enough of those – but an earthquake on the other side of the planet isn’t one of them.” 

Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News

According to the Pew Research Center, the average American spends between 58 and 96 minutes a day consuming news. Over the course of a year, this amounts to nearly an entire month of news consumption. But given the many harms we have explored, news consumption is more than just an enormous waste of time – it is a kind of mental poison. In choosing to abstain from the news, we cleanse and detoxify our mind and improve our psychological health.  

“Just see these superfluous ones! Sick are they always; they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Or as Dobelli concludes:   

“The news is mental pollution. Keep your brain clean. It’s your most important organ…Still worried about missing ‘something important’? In my experience, when something truly important happens, you hear about it even if you’re living in a protected news-cocoon…Big news will inevitably leak out and find you…And if somehow you don’t hear about the bus attack, it doesn’t matter. On the contrary, you should be pleased. Worse things may be happening on other planets, and we are comfortable remaining in the dark.” 

Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News

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Source

 https://academyofideas.com/2025/06/why-the-news-promotes-ignorance-and-mental-illness/

The WHO Keeps Failing Upward

The WHO Keeps Failing Upward

Ramesh Thakur   May 25, 2025   Pharma, Policy, Public Health   17 minute read

The phenomenon of failing upward is only too familiar among the ranks of Australian politicians. People from other countries also come readily to mind as examples, including former US President Joe Biden, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, and European Union President Ursula von der Leyen. Lately we’ve also witnessed this with an international organisation.

The World Health Assembly is the governing body of the World Health Organisation (WHO). It’s been meeting in Geneva this week (19–27 May) to adopt a new pandemic treaty that will reward the WHO for its gross mismanagement of the Covid pandemic by strengthening the framework for global health cooperation under WHO auspices. The accord’s focus is on building a global surveillance system to detect emerging pathogens and respond swiftly with coordinated measures, including the development and equitable distribution of medical countermeasures.

Yet, the premise of the accords is an inflated account of pandemic risk that is simply not supported by historical evidence. As a result, its effect will be to badly distort health priorities away from the real health needs and other social and economic goals of many countries. Only 11 countries abstained with 124 countries voting in support of adopting the new accords. The treaty will enter into force when 60 countries have ratified it.

Whoever thought it was a good idea to give any bureaucracy and its head the power to declare a pandemic emergency that will expand its reach, authority, budget, and personnel and shift the balance of decision-making away from states to an unelected globalist bureaucrat? Or to adopt a One Health approach when the empirical reality is of sharply differentiated health vulnerabilities and disease burdens between regions? We need devolution, not more centralisation, with the principle of subsidiarity linking the distribution of authority and resources at the different levels.

Before empowering the WHO to cause even more harm, we should first investigate its Covid failings and decide if major reform can overcome the accumulated vested interests or if we need a new international health organisation. Any organisation that has been around for 80 years has either succeeded in its core mission, in which case it should be wound down out of existence. Or else it has failed, in which case it should be abolished and replaced by a new one that is more fit for purpose in today’s world.

WHO’s Failures to Speak Truth to Power and Profit

Speaking at a media briefing in Geneva on 3 March 2020, WHO Director-General (DG) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Covid’s case fatality rate (CFR) was 3.4 percent, against the seasonal flu’s CFR of below 1 percent. Addressing an internal meeting of the body negotiating a new pandemic agreement on 7 April 2025, he said: ‘Officially 7 million people were killed [by Covid], but we estimate the true toll to be 20 million.’

It’s hard to see why both statements, delivered five years apart as bookends to the Covid pandemic, do not constitute examples of misinformation. They are tantamount to catastrophisation and fear-mongering that spread alarm around the world at a rapid pace to begin with and then underpinned WHO efforts to commandeer even more powers and resources for future pandemic emergencies to be declared at the sole judgment of the WHO DG (Article 12 of the IHR). Yet in earlier drafts of the new pandemic accord, anyone who questioned the two sets of statistics would be guilty of spreading misinformation and could be sanctioned. For, like New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, the WHO must be revered as the single source of pandemic truth for the whole world.

On the total Covid mortality toll, forget the 20 million estimate. Almost all the alarmist calculations at the upper end of Covid-related deaths are derived from GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) computer modelling, not hard data. Even the seven million total does not discount the number of people in that age bracket (remember, the average age of Covid death is higher than life expectancy) who would have died of old age in the five-year period anyway. Nor those who died because early detection of treatable conditions were cancelled as part of lockdown measures; those who were admitted to hospitals with unrelated ailments but contracted Covid there; those who died with Covid after being injected with a Covid vaccine once, twice, or multiple times; or those who might have died from vaccine injuries.

As for the CFR, many experts immediately expressed scepticism that it was as high as 3.4 percent. Some cautioned against generalising from the distinctive Chinese experience. Mark Woolhouse, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Edinburgh University, said as early as 4 March 2020 that the 3.4 percent CFR estimate could be up to ‘ten times too high,’ bringing it into line with some strains of influenza.

Firstly, the CFR is extremely challenging to estimate during an epidemic and in particular in its early days: it takes time for reliable data and trends to emerge, collate, and identify. The best estimates of CFR can only come when an epidemic is over. Deaths are confirmed as and when they occur but many early cases are missed or not reported. The true CFR and infection fatality rates (IFR) cannot be estimated until population seroprevalence (antibody) surveys are undertaken to establish the proportion of individuals who were infected, including those who did not manifest symptoms.

Yet, infamously, when Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya [now the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)] and colleagues became the first to publish the results of a seroprevalence survey in Santa Clara County, California in early April 2020 which showed up a significantly higher infected population implying a correspondingly lower fatality rates, he was ferociously vilified and even investigated (but cleared) by his university. The results did not fit the catastrophist narrative. Yet another study by a different team in Orange County, California in February 2021 confirmed that the seroprevalence rate was seven times higher than the official county statistics. Other survey results from Germany and the Netherlands were also consistent with a higher infection rate.

Early data – from China, Italy, Spain, the Diamond Princess cruise ship – told us in February–March 2020 already that the most vulnerable were elderly people with existing serious health conditions. An early study from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention also confirmed the steep age gradient of Covid-related mortality: 0.2-0.4 percent for under-50s rising to 14.8 percent for those 80 and above. As early as 7 May 2020, a mainstream outlet like the BBC published a chart showing the risk of dying with Covid closely tracking the ‘normal’ distribution of age-stratified death rates.

In an October 2022 study that looked at 31 pre-vaccination national seroprevalence covering 29 countries to estimate the IFR stratified by age, John Ioannidis and his team found that the average IFR was 0.0003 percent at 0-19 years, 0.002 percent at 20-29 years, 0.011 percent at 30-39 years, and 0.035 percent at 40-49 years. The median for 0-59 year-olds was just 0.034 percent. These are well within and often lower than the seasonal flu range for the under-60s. The under-70s make up 94 percent of the world’s population or about 7.3 billion people. The age-stratified survival rate of healthy under-70s who were infected by Covid-19 before vaccines became available was a staggering 99.905 percent. For children and adolescents under 20, the survival rate is 99.9997 percent. 

Experts from Oxford University’s Centre for Evidence Based Medicine used subsequent actual data to back-calculate a survival rate of 99.9992 percent for healthy under-20s in Britain. Official data from the UK Office for National Statistics for 1990–2020 show that the age-standardised mortality rate (deaths per 100,000 people) in England and Wales in 2020 was lower in 19 of the previous 30 years. Remember, this is before vaccines.

The doomsday model from Imperial College London’s Neil Ferguson on 16 March 2020 that precipitated lockdowns estimated the survival rate to be twenty times lower. There is a long track record of abysmally wrong catastrophist predictions on infectious diseases from this Pied Piper of Pandemic Porn: mad cow disease in 2002, avian flu in 2005, swine flu in 2009. Given his past record, why did anyone in authority give him a platform to propagate ‘The sky is falling’ yet again? He remains with the WHO Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Modelling at Imperial College London. This in itself is a sad and sorry indictment of the WHO.

The Disease Burden Spread by Income Level of Countries

According to Our World in Data, in the five years from 4 January 2020 to 4 January 2025, 7.08 million people were officially confirmed as having died with Covid-19 around the world. According to the same source, 14 percent of the world’s 55 million deaths in 2019 were due to infectious diseases, including pneumonia and other lower respiratory diseases 4.4 percent, 2.7 percent diarrheal, and 2 percent tuberculosis. Another 74 percent were caused by noncommunicable diseases: 33 percent from heart diseases, 18 percent from cancers, and 7 percent from chronic respiratory diseases as the three leading causes of deaths in the year before Covid.

If we do a simple linear extrapolation, that means that in the same five-year period since January 2020, around 203.5 million people would have died from noncommunicable diseases and another 38.5 million from non-Covid infectious diseases (Table 1).

The sum of mortality and morbidity is called the ‘burden of disease.’ This is measured by a metric called ‘Disability Adjusted Life Years’ (DALYs). These are standardised units to measure years of lost health that help to compare the burden of different diseases in different countries, populations, and times. Conceptually, one DALY represents one lost year of healthy life – it is the equivalent of losing one year in good health because of either premature death or disease or disability.

Our World in Data breaks the disease burden down into three categories of disability or disease: noncommunicable diseases; communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases; and injuries. Figure 1 illustrates the importance of disaggregating the disease burden, as measured by DALYs, between the low- and high-income countries instead of lumping them into one catch-all category that loses conceptual coherence. The total DALYs in the former in 2021 were 331.3 million and in the latter, 401.2 million.

In the low-income countries, the percentage share of DALYs due to communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases was 55.8 percent, while that due to noncommunicable diseases was 34.7 percent. But in the high-income countries, they were 10.5 and 81.1 percent. That is why Covid-19 was a relatively far more serious threat to the rich countries compared to the poor countries. But even for them, this was true only during the brief period of the pandemic, which reduces to a mere blip in the long view.

The relative disease burden of pandemics is even less salient when we recall that in the period during which the WHO has been in existence, the only other pandemics to have occurred were the Asian and Hong Kong flu pandemics in 1957–58 and 1968–69, in each of which around two million people died (the WHO gives the death estimates as 1.1 and 1 million respectively – thanks David Bell); and the swine flu pandemic in 2009–10, in which between 0.1 and 1.9 million people died (the WHO estimates the range as 123,000-203,000). The Russian flu pandemic of 1977 was even milder. The historical timeline of pandemics shows how improvements in sanitation, hygiene, potable water, antibiotics, and other forms of expanding access to good healthcare have massively reduced the morbidity and mortality of pandemics since the Spanish flu (1918–20) in which 50-100 million people are estimated to have died.

Pandemics Require Policy Trade-Offs

In responding to an epidemic or pandemic, there is a trade-off between public health, economic stability, and individual well-being. It is the duty of health professionals to focus solely on the first. It is the responsibility of governments to strike the optimum balance and intuit the social fulcrum: the sweet spot at the intersection of dangerous complacency, alarmist panic, and reasonable precautions. The injunction to first do no harm implies that governments should be wary of prolonged economic lockdowns: the cure might indeed be worse than the disease. In earlier flu epidemics, the numbers infected and killed were sufficient to produce a severe impact on society. But governments didn’t shut down their country, destroy the economy nor jeopardise their way of life. People suffered but endured.

In the case of Covid-19, almost all the mistakes and damage can be traced back to two mutually contradictory assumptions, neither of which was ever revised back to the mean. First, assume the absolute worst about the pandemic on infectivity, speed of progression in the infected, rate of cross-infection, lethality, and lack of treatment options. Second, assume the very best about the effectiveness of all policy interventions, regardless of the existing science and lack of any real world data (some rules like universal masking and two-metre physical separation were based on rushed but flawed research and guesswork), the cries of caution from a wide range of well-credentialled and well-meaning specialists with no private agenda and financial conflicts of interest, and the need for careful analyses of the risk profiles of population cohorts for the virus and the harms-benefits equation of interventions. The two sets of extreme assumptions were then used to embark on radical new interventions that had never before been tried at global and universal scale.

WHO’s Sins of Commission and Omission

The WHO should have stepped in immediately as the international institutional firewall against this. It did not. The top leadership of the WHO joined national health-bureaucracy counterparts in the world’s most powerful and influential countries in the belief that they knew best and colluded in the brutal drowning of all dissenting voices. The consequences were catastrophic and have caused lasting damage to public health. Dr Jay Bhattacharya, the new NIH director, was interviewed by Politico recently. He identified both his own NIH and the WHO as among the leading examples of institutions of this dual pathology. They:

… convinced governments around the world that the only way to save lives was to follow the lockdown path and that they needed extraordinary, almost dictatorial powers, suppressing free speech, suppressing freedom of movement, suppressing the principle of informed consent in medical decision-making, controlling nearly every single aspect of society, designating who’s essential and who’s not essential, closing churches, closing businesses. 

And they made this decision for the whole world…

The WHO failed the peoples of the world by becoming a cheerleader for panicked responses instead of holding the line on existing science, knowledge, and experience. This was summarised in its own report of 19 September 2019 that advised against lockdowns, other than for very short periods, border closures, masks in general community settings, etc. The WHO proved too credulous of early Chinese data on the risk of human-human transmission, no Wuhan lab origin, lethality, and effectiveness of tough containment measures. The first WHO panel to investigate the origins of Covid was riddled with conflicts of interest of key panel members and again gave China a free pass. A follow-up investigation was thwarted by active non-cooperation from China, for which it failed to be held to account.

Other WHO sins of commission included exaggerations of Covid lethality by presenting highly inflated case fatality rates; obfuscation on the age-stratified risk profile of severe illness and mortality from Covid; unscientific recommendations on mask mandates and later vaccine passports, or at least failure to combat them; and complicity in the human rights abuses committed in pursuit of the fool’s gold of Covid eradication. For example, the SARS-CoV-2 virus was never a good candidate for vaccination owing to its low virulence, high transmissibility, and rapid mutation characteristics. Nor did it take long for data to confirm the highly unfavourable risk-benefit equation of Covid-19 vaccines.

Sins of omission included downplaying the predictable and predicted short and long-term health, mental health, educational, economic, social, and human rights harms of the drastic interventions like school closures; the escalation of avoidable non-Covid deaths through disrupted food production and distribution, disrupted childhood immunisation programs in low income countries and deferred and cancelled early detection programs and treatment of cancers, etc in industrialised countries; the deaths of despair of elderly people cut off from the emotional support crutches of loved family; the inflationary spirals that are yet to subside from government support schemes to compensate for loss of incomes owing to economic shutdowns; and the substantial erosion of trust in public institutions in general and public health institutions in particular.

WHO advice on Covid management also seemed to prioritise the high disease burden of industrialised over developing countries and the interests of the major global pharmaceutical companies over patients, for example in the way that the promising potential of some repurposed drugs with well-established safety profiles were discounted and even mocked and ridiculed instead of being impartially investigated. Yet, there have been no admissions of culpability, no apologies for the extensive and lasting damage inflicted, and no accountability for those responsible for unleashing and cheerleading the public policy insanity.

Trump’s America Exits the WHO

Of course, WHO recommendations are not legally binding obligations on treaty signatories. The treaty explicitly states that nothing in it gives the WHO or the DG ‘any authority to direct, order, alter or otherwise prescribe’ any policy; or to mandate or…impose any requirements’ that states parties ‘take specific actions’ like travel bans, vaccination mandates, or lockdowns (Article 22.2). However, the very first function of the WHO is described in its constitution as ‘to act as the directing and coordinating authority on international health work’ (Article 2.a). The Pandemic Treaty’s preamble recognises that the WHO ‘is the directing and coordinating authority on international health work, including on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.’

In combination with the amended International Health Regulations (IHR) that come into force this September and which must and will be read in parallel, the political reality is that member states will be enmeshed into the international pandemic management framework led by international technocrats who lack the legitimacy of democratically elected political leaders, are not in practice accountable, and who have been given this enhanced directive role without meaningful parliamentary scrutiny or public debate by citizens.

Nothing in the Covid experience inspires confidence about the willingness and capacity of political leaders to resist WHO recommendations in this global institutional milieu. Rather, a de facto realignment of chairs at the decision-making table will see the experts take up positions at the head of the table instead of merely being present at the table to aid and advise. This is why the pandemic accords are the latest waystations on the journey to an international administrative state that consolidates what Garrett Brown, David Bell, and Blagovesta Tacheva call the globe-spanning ‘new pandemic industry.’

The Trump administration, at least, is trying to resist the march to the collectivist destination. On 21 January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the US from the WHO. The WHO confronts a $2.5 billion shortfall between 2025 and 2027. Its financial situation is not helped by Trump’s decision to pull the US out. On 20 May, as the 78^th meeting of the World Health Assembly got underway in Geneva to vote on the new pandemic treaty, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy, Jr explained why. Addressing his counterparts from other countries in a brief video message on X, he said the US withdrawal should serve as ‘a wake-up call’ to other countries that, ‘like many legacy institutions,’ the WHO has been corrupted by political and corporate interests and ‘is mired in bureaucratic bloat.’

Since inception, the WHO has accomplished important work, including the eradication of smallpox. More recently, however, its ‘priorities have increasingly reflected the biases and interests of corporate medicine.’ ‘Too often it has allowed political agendas, like pushing harmful gender ideology, to hijack its core mission.’ In an echo of my earlier lament above, Kennedy said that ‘The WHO has not even come to terms with its failures during Covid, let alone made significant reforms.’ Instead it has doubled down with the pandemic agreement ‘which will lock in all of the dysfunctions of the WHO pandemic response.’ 

‘Global cooperation on health is still critically important,’ but ‘not working very well under the WHO,’ Kennedy said. Countries like China have been allowed to exert a malign influence on WHO operations in pursuit of their own interests rather than in service of the people of the world. When it comes to democratic countries, actions of the WHO suggest a failure to acknowledge that its members are and must remain accountable to their citizens and neither to transnational nor to corporate interests. ‘We want to free international health cooperation from the straitjacket of political interference by corrupting influences of the pharmaceutical companies, of adversarial nations, and their NGO proxies.’ 

‘We need to reboot the whole system,’ he concluded, and shift our focus to the prevalence of chronic diseases that are sickening peoples and bankrupting health systems. This will better serve the needs of people instead of maximising industry profit. ‘Let’s create new institutions or revisit existing institutions that are lean, efficient, transparent, and accountable. Whether it’s an emergency outbreak of an infectious disease or the pervasive rot of chronic conditions,’ the US is ready to work with others.

That is a clear and compelling rationale put forward by Kennedy for the US withdrawal from the WHO. The international elite will circle the wagons to defend the expansion of the international administrative state. The political leaders in thrall to the expert class will genuflect to their advice. Those seduced by the idealism of international solidarity and others corrupted by the lucre of pharmaceutical lobbyists will not be persuaded by Kennedy. Competent leaders of self-confident countries, however, should take up his offer to nest the ethic of global health cooperation in a new specialised international organisation that better respects the health sovereignty of member states and the health needs of people.

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author.

Author

• Ramesh Thakur, a Brownstone Institute Senior Scholar, is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, and emeritus professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University.

-----------------------------

Source

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-who-keeps-failing-upward/

AHPRA: Public Health Watchdog, Big Pharma Lapdog, or Drug Enabler

AHPRA: Public Health Watchdog, Big Pharma Lapdog, or Drug Enabler

Ramesh Thakur   May 17, 2025   Pharma, Public Health  

A Doctor Dies by Suicide

Mei-Khing Loo is a former practice manager whose 43-year-old obstetrician-gynaecologist husband of 21 years, Dr Yen-Yung Yap, died by suicide in 2020 while under investigation by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA). He left behind three young children. Another speaker intimately familiar with the case explained how Dr Yap had his livelihood destroyed for having delivered two babies by suction rather than forceps in Adelaide in 2015 and 2019. 

There was no complaint to AHPRA, no litigation, no damage to the babies. In both cases ‘subgaleal haemorrhage’ was suspected but never diagnosed and the babies were discharged and went home within five days. An internal audit resulted in an AHPRA notification.

Four doctors who knew Dr Yap told his legal team that he had done nothing wrong in either birth. But the AHPRA-nominated expert (in gestational diabetes) claimed forceps should have been used and AHPRA imposed restrictions that effectively made it impossible for Dr Yap to continue his practice. ‘The ongoing harassment from AHPRA and the Medical Board will make me mentally and emotionally traumatised and professionally unable to care for my patients, and financially unable to care for our kids,’ he wrote in a letter to his wife shortly before his suicide.

Mei-Khing addressed a full audience in Sydney on 3 May about her grief, pain, and unsated anger, through bouts of sobbing and tears. Her speech was passionate, resonant, and yet also in the end inspiring, with a call to maintain the rage against the callous regulator. Only a change in the culture and institutional setup of the regulator to make it more compassionate can best ensure that Dr Yap did not die in vain, she said. She was the only one of the roughly two dozen speakers at the conference to receive a standing ovation from the audience that had listened rapt in pin-drop silence to her presentation.

It also put in perspective another speaker who referenced an insensitive and ‘flippant’ comment from a former Medical Board of Australia chair: ‘These doctors who are getting all stressed about a clearly frivolous complaint [to AHPRA] should really go and learn how to manage their stress a bit better’ (In the series of podcasts from the Australian Society of Anaesthetists, Episode 84, 4 December 2023, at around the 29:40 mark).

Mei-Khing is the human face of some alarming statistics on health professionals’ lack of confidence in AHPRA. According to Kara Thomas, Secretary of the  Australian Medical Professionals Society, in a survey for AMPS 82.6 percent of healthcare professionals said that AHPRA lacks fairness and transparency in handling complaints and 78.5 percent reported unfair treatment at its hands because of a ‘guilty until proven innocent’ approach to investigating complaints.

This is hardly surprising. In March 2023, AHPRA released the results of its own study on the distressing impacts of Australia’s regulatory complaints process on doctors. The study resulted in a peer-reviewed article on 26 September 2023 in the International Journal for Quality in Health Care, an Oxford University Press journal. It’s worth noting that the study team included Tonkin and AHPRA CEO Martin Fletcher, along with six other AHPRA staff. 

The study covered the four-year period 2018–2021 inclusive. Its major findings included the shocking fact that 20 healthcare practitioners involved in a regulatory process over the four-year period had committed or attempted suicide or self-harm resulting in 16 deaths, of which 12 were confirmed suicides and the other four were deemed likely suicides based on the information available. Few if any of the 20 practitioners were being investigated for a complaint regarding their clinical performance. 

‘The Misdeeds of AHPRA’ Conference

Adapting a popular saying against teachers, Dr Robert Malone wrote recently in Brownstone Journal: ‘Those who can, do. Those who can’t, regulate.’ An impressive number of health practitioners gathered for the day-long conference in Sydney on ‘The Misdeeds of AHPRA’ on 3 May. The conference was oversubscribed, with many late registrants having to be turned away. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, no one from AHPRA seemed to be present although they had been invited.

In Australia, registered health practitioners across 16 professions are regulated by AHPRA and 15 National Boards as part of a national, multi-professional regulatory scheme. The goal is to streamline and standardise the regulatory system to ensure consistency, high quality, and national standards while protecting the public against medical malpractice and misconduct.

Driven by the profit-maximising motive of the pharmaceutical industry and the capture of lawmakers, health bureaucrats, and regulators by lobbyists, the public health sector today is guilty of medicalising ordinary human suffering and pathologising the natural life cycles of human beings, including ageing. The entire system is built to put and keep people on medication, from the cradle to the grave. No one dies of old age anymore. My GP would not accept, because the official form could not code, old age as the cause of death of my parents. I had to mention a specific cause that could be inputted for the computer to accept the answer.

One speaker listed the big criminal fines on Big Pharma that total $123 billion (unspecified but probably US currency) in just this century. Internal pharma documents confirm that they retain ownership and control of studies that they sponsor and that the purpose of the data collected is to support marketing of their product. They suppress adverse events data, cherry-pick data on benefits, remunerate researchers generously but don’t permit them to control use of data, draw up plans to influence regulatory agencies and health bureaucrats, liaise with media, and expand the market for their product through ‘disease-mongering’ strategies. In this context, too many medical and scientific journals, especially those sponsored by the industry, are tainted and in effect an extension of the marketing arm of the pharmaceutical industry.

Over the course of the day, it became clear that we were in the midst of a roomful of people who had paid a price – some a small price, others a heavier price, and a few the ultimate price: financial, professional, and personal (strain on family, suspicions on the part of friends and colleagues, deteriorating health, toll on mental health). Yet all they had tried to do, in their opinion, was to stand up for patient safety and welfare as their primary, indeed overriding duty of care.

The conference was convened by AMPS and the Australian Doctors Federation. The discussions ranged widely over just what had happened, how it had all been possible, and what institutional safeguards can be recreated to avoid a repetition of the horrors of unscientific, unethical, and deeply corrosive health policy and practices.

An outsider to the healthcare profession is struck by the extraordinary complexity of the public healthcare provider and regulatory system. Little wonder that it’s become a broken system in need of urgent repair or replacement. There has been a slow but steady shift from patient-centric care based on physicians’ judgment and informed patient consent to protocol-governed compliance with rules and regulations set by bureaucrats. This has had the consequence and may indeed have been motivated by the desire to protect politicians and health bureaucrats, not the patients and certainly not the doctors.

The Covid Legacy Hangs Heavy

The organisers in their introduction emphasised the importance of engaging in the conversation in a spirit of open dialogue in the hope of effecting positive change. But they did note that this would be in contrast to the behaviour of the regulator during the pandemic. The broad consensus among speakers and participants was that patient care suffered during the Covid years. Principles of good medical practice (non-maleficence or first do no harm, beneficence or do good, justice meaning equitable access to healthcare, individual autonomy, and personal agency as the basis for informed patient consent) were violated. 

During the Covid years the cadre of public health technocrats deployed a lethal combination of fear and moralism to foment mass hysteria that overrode existing checks on their authority and rode roughshod over safeguards and liberties to gather in even more power to themselves. Yet, many official claims were either known from the start or subsequently shown to be at odds with the scientific evidence:

• Covid-19 could only have started in the Wuhan wet markets v. plausibility of Wuhan lab origin;
• Covid-19 kills healthy children, adolescents, and young v. negligible mortality of these cohorts;
• mRNA is broken down in minutes and doesn’t pose long-term safety issues v. mRNA and spike protein detected in blood months and possibly years after injection;
• mRNA and adenoviral vectors are not gene therapies and required only the usual levels of regulatory scrutiny v. they were developed as gene therapies and should have received more rigorous scrutiny;
• mRNA vaccines contain minimal DNA contamination v. they were heavily contaminated and had potentially lethal side effects;
• Covid-19 vaccines prevent infection and community transmission v. they prevent neither infection nor transmission.

How many of us experienced being otherised while walking outdoors sans mask, with passersby crossing to the lighted side of the street to escape from the vector of disease spread that any uncovered face symbolised? The arrival and mandating of Covid vaccines crystallised the moral landscape with even sharper clarity and bled over into a class bias that persists to this day.

For children especially the risk of severe illness or death from Covid is very slight. The risks of serious reactions to vaccines are higher. Protection against risk of reinfection is at least as robust and may last significantly longer for children who are infected but not vaccinated compared to the Covid-naïve who are vaccinated. The long-term effects of Covid vaccines are unknown. In the absence of other known treatments, existing antiviral inflammatory drugs with established safety profiles could and should have been repurposed to treat Covid-19.

Every one of these statements is contestable and subject to revision as the databank grows and more studies are published, but not one is so implausible as to be summarily dismissed.

In these circumstances, for health bureaucrats and regulators to claim a monopoly on scientific truth is just not good enough. The effort to shut down legitimate debates on pain of excommunication from the medical profession represents a clear and present danger to public health. I certainly have more confidence in my consultant’s professional advice based on training, qualifications, experience, and knowledge of my medical history, free of pressures to conform to the zeitgeist from bureaucrats and regulators, the latter often with questionable links to industry. Those of us without medical credentials arouse understandable scepticism towards our critiques. This makes it all the more imperative not to silence medical professionals but to welcome and encourage contestable policy recommendations from them.

In recent times American and British authorities have admitted to the lack of any scientific basis for such mandatory lockdown-era measures as the two metre/six foot distance rule and school closures. Why did the Australian authorities adopt the rule? Did they have independent scientific advice to justify it or were they guilty of herd behaviour in mimicking what Europe, Britain, and America were doing?

We looked in vain for the emergence of an Australian equivalent of Anders Tegnell. Sweden’s state epidemiologist showed remarkable courage of scientific convictions in standing against the herd and provided the world with the most instructive control group of all against the anti-scientific idiocy of lockdowns. In an interview with Nature early in the pandemic on 21 April 2020, Tegnell explained that the sole basis for the tough love of lockdowns was epidemiological modelling:

Closedown, lockdown, closing borders — nothing has a historical scientific basis …. We have looked at a number of European Union countries to see whether they have published any analysis of the effects of these measures before they were started and we saw almost none.

AHPRA also has structural and operational links with the World Health Organisation (WHO). As a designated Collaborating Centre, AHPRA partners with the WHO to promote best practice in health workforce regulation and promote access to quality health care, including by capacity building in other countries. More concerningly, AHPRA supports global regulatory capacity, implements WHO programs, and aligns with international (that is, not just national) priorities. Yet, whenever challenged, both the WHO and AHPRA reject the claim that this dilutes national autonomy. 

Practitioner Concerns about AHPRA

The protracted crisis in Australia’s medical regulatory system has developed over more than a decade. Every Australian is directly affected, either as a consumer of healthcare and/or as one of the 900,000 healthcare professionals. Practitioners have concerns regarding the judgment, consistency, proportionality, accountability, and independence of AHPRA as Australia’s medical regulator. They believe its flaws and failures put at risk the integrity of Australia’s healthcare system and the medical autonomy of doctors.

Two-tier justice meted out by AHPRA is indicated in several examples where serious misconduct or bad practice that harmed patients resulted in a mild slap of the wrist, whereas conduct that departs from the approved narrative, even when no patient has suffered harm, entangles the doctor in a costly and high-stress investigation that can involve suspension of the right to practice medicine for extended periods while the investigation proceeds at a leisurely pace.

In the complaints-driven system, AHPRA’s KPI effectively seems to be not patient safety and welfare, but the number of doctors taken down. They demand moral purity of doctors, but exempt themselves from the same requirement. Ditto transparency and independent external scrutiny. They are meant to protect patient safety and promote patient welfare, but destroy the doctors on whom patients rely for safe medical care. ‘Independence’ of the regulator in practice has been corrupted into meaning that they are not answerable to anyone else. They review and clear themselves whenever accused of overreach and responsibility for harming doctors. The system is durable and resilient because it allows governments to disclaim responsibility for the regulator’s decisions, washing their hands Pontius Pilate-like for the fate of doctors harmed by their aloofness and callousness.

Notifications to alert AHPRA and the Boards to concerns about a registered health practitioner’s performance, conduct, or health are central to the public protection objective. However, practitioners have many concerns about the prevalence and management of ‘vexatious’ notifications that are disproportionately stressful and distressing. In particular, said one speaker, ‘AHPRA has weaponised anonymous complaints, to allow the process to be the punishment, without the need for proof.’ Several pointed to the potential for targeting doctors without supporting evidence by an AHPRA that takes an adversarial stance against practitioners under investigation, the virtually unlimited scope for investigations, the silencing of practitioners, and the fear-based compliance by practitioners.

Sometimes AHPRA tries to have it both ways. One speaker put up a slide that quoted a position paper from AHPRA and National Boards on 9 March 2021. It warned doctors, on pain of prosecution by AHPRA, not to promote anti-vaccination statements and health advice, and not to advise patients against Covid vaccination. Yet, the same guidance also required all health practitioners ‘to use their professional judgment and the best available evidence’ in their practice of medicine. Another speaker cited examples of the medical literature often publishing contradictory conclusions drawn on vaccine safety and efficacy from study of the same data, for example in the New England Journal of Medicine and Vaccine.

Health practitioners particularly resent the two-tier justice which doesn’t deploy the same process and standards of evidence for complaints levelled at AHPRA and the Boards. Given the undeniable reality that AHPRA investigations can cause harms that range from minor to serious, a key question is: How to hold regulatory bodies like AHPRA accountable for their actions? Who will watch the watchdogs?

A two-year review of the notifications framework by the National Health Practitioner Ombudsman Richelle McCausland on 9 December 2024 noted the tension between the function of AHPRA and Boards to ensure patient safety while also ensuring that practitioners ‘are treated fairly and not placed under undue stress.’ Her report acknowledged concerns that the complaints notifications process can be vexatious and ‘is being “weaponised” to harm practitioners.’ She made 17 recommendations to better resolve the tension between patient safety concerns and practitioners’ rights to due process and their welfare.

A Queensland Supreme Court judgment on 13 December 2024 held that an extraordinary pandemic such as Covid-19 does not abrogate doctors’ rights to ‘procedural fairness’ before ‘an unbiassed tribunal,’ nor extend the Medical Board’s ‘regulatory role to include protection of government and regulatory agencies from political criticism.’

Quo Vadis? The Government, Our Enemy

There seemed to be broad agreement among the speakers and participants that the ‘subjugation’ of the medical profession under AHPRA is failing both society at large as well as the healthcare professionals who come under its jurisdiction. It seems structurally and operationally unable to lift safety standards and health outcomes. To this end, doctors owe a duty to patients to overcome fear, become strong, and unite against the budding tyranny of AHPRA.

To reverse the loss of proportionality and independence, AHPRA should be returned to being a registration and accreditation body. It should terminate its status as a WHO collaborating centre. Doctors must unite to defend informed consent, clinical discretion, and the sanctity of  the doctor-patient relationship. This can only come about if and when doctors, patients, and the public join forces to push back government intrusions into the clinic.

Many speakers and members of the audience raised important questions on where we go from where we are. Should Australia revert to state-based regulators or stay with a national regulator? In the US the system is chiefly state-based. In Canada, it operates mainly at the national level. This may be a false binary choice. The principle of subsidiarity would embrace both levels of regulation.

A question that arises with respect to any institution or bureaucracy that gradually descends into dysfunctionality is should it be reformed or abolished and replaced? Whatever the answer, advocates must understand the importance of framing the issue. In particular, their remarks and recommendations have to be patient-centric, and not focus on doctors’ privileges and perks. Equally, they must articulate the key foundational principles like integrity, independence, professionalism, competence, transparency, informed consent, and scientific accountability. In addition, they need to explain why these matter for the health and integrity of the registration and accreditation system so that it can ensure the highest level of patient care.

The pathology of regulatory excess is more widespread and generalised than just the medical sector. Because the conference was focussed narrowly on the misdeeds of AHPRA, there was no linkage made to the broader societal and political trends that have resulted in the growth of the administrative, surveillance, and regulatory state. Quasi-autonomous NGOs (Quangos) are supposedly independent bodies that are nevertheless set up, wholly or partly funded, and appointed by governments. They have been delegated some legislative and some judicial functions that circumvent the formal machinery of government and end up exercising de facto governmental powers without any responsibility for the consequences of their actions, no clear lines of accountability, and seemingly unanswerable to anyone.

Elected politicians and unelected judges alike have seen their powers shift to unelected and unaccountable technocrats. AHPRA is part of that institutional landscape. Australian doctors as a class are among the victims of that power grab. Many – but not nearly enough – brave souls who stood up to it and other organisations in the brotherhood of medical regulators paid a heavy price in the form of censure, deregistration, and loss of professional jobs and status.

The uncontrolled proliferation of Quangos has unmoored the state from its democratic anchor and made it distant from the people. Increasingly, the state neither reflects our needs and aspirations nor responds to our concerns. More and more people are waking up to the reality of the administrative state that has slowly but surely captured almost all key institutions and is stealthily strangulating democracy. This is a major explanation for the success of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party in England’s local elections on 1 May.

Key to the reforms will be rebalancing the doctor-regulator relationship in the boardroom, on the one hand, and re-sacralising the doctor-patient relationship in the clinic, on the other. And establishing a better balance between patient safety, doctors’ rights and welfare, and regulatory reach. If the Leviathan is to be defeated, the resistance will have to be much more broad-based than each sector taking on bits of the state apparatus piecemeal.

The question addressed in this article to Australia’s medical regulator, as to whether the public health watchdog has been corrupted into a Big Pharma lapdog and drug enabler, is relevant for most countries. As in most areas in the current era, the United States has the heaviest normative weight and strongest gravitational pull of any country in the world. For better or worse, the presence of the likes of Robert F Kennedy, Jr, Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makary, and Vinay Prasad in the top echelons of public health decision-making in Washington, DC is bound to have ripple effects in other countries in recalibrating the normative settling point of public health policy.

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author.

Author

• Ramesh Thakur, a Brownstone Institute Senior Scholar, is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, and emeritus professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University.

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Source

https://brownstone.org/articles/ahpra-public-health-watchdog-big-pharma-lapdog-or-drug-enabler/