Is it time for Britain to leave the WHO?

Since declaring Covid-19 to be ‘over as a global health emergency’ early last month, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has made it very clear that it has no intention of reforming. At its World Health Assembly two weeks ago, North Korea was among ten nations elected to sit on the WHO’s Executive Board, thereby giving Kim Jong-un’s totalitarian state the power to appoint WHO regional directors and potentially vote for the next director-general. The World Health Assembly did not censure North Korea for its countless human rights abuses, which include starving its own people. Instead it singled out Israel for criticism.

A few days later, as Russian bombs fell on Ukrainian families, the WHO’s director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, met Putin’s deputy health minister to discuss what Dr Tedros described in an ill-advised tweet as Russia’s ‘work to advance maternal and child health’.