Authored by Yaffa Shir-Raz via Brownstone Institute,

“I need to ask someone else to take responsibility for the second part of the approvals process, so that I won’t have a conflict of interest. I’m also working with Bill Gates and the World Health Organization on the vaccine itself.”

This admission of a conflict of interest was made by Prof. Lester Schulman, secretary of the Ministry of Health’s polio committee,in March 2023, during an internal discussion about approving the importation into Israel of a new polio vaccine.The vaccine was developed and promoted by the World Health Organization in collaboration with theBill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and its approval pathway relied on a new emergency authorization mechanism the WHO has developed in recent years: the EUL (Emergency Use Listing).

Although the remark was framed as a technical aside, it was an unusual confession of a conflict of interest by the committee’s secretary. Its seriousness is compounded by the fact that it was made only after the committee had already voted by an overwhelming majority to initiate the process of bringing the vaccine to Israel, and after it had already worked vigorously to persuade the Pharmaceutical Division to cooperate.

The quotation does not appear in the official minutes of the meeting that were provided to us. It is heard on an audio recording of the session,one of several recordings passed on to us by a whistleblower. The minutes were provided only following a Freedom of Information request and subsequent litigation.

The episode is serious in its own right. But it goes far beyond a local episode of personal conflict of interest or an administrative failure within Israel’s health system. The materials point to something more consequential:the use of an international emergency authorization pathway to shape regulatory decisions inside a sovereign state, advanced through overlapping professional networks, without the organization assuming the legal responsibilities borne by national regulators.

In the United States, recent political debates over withdrawal from the World Health Organization were widelyframedas a clash between scientific consensus and institutional criticism. Yet the Israeli case, and the materials in our possession, point to a much larger picture.

This was the first implementation of the EUL mechanism within a country with a functioning Western regulatory system. Israel served here as a regulatory test case: an attempt to determine whether it is possible, in practice, to shape an approval pathway inside a sovereign state without holding formal regulatory authority and without being subject to the judicial and parliamentary oversight that applies to a national regulator. In doing so, it exposes how the organization has been operating in recent years: no longer merely an advisory and coordinating body, but an institution that creates operating frameworks that, in practice, shape approval processes inside sovereign states.

The World Health Organization was established in 1948 as an intergovernmental bodytaskedwith providing professional assistance and technical guidance, promoting research, collecting knowledge, and developing recommendations for its member states.Article 22of the WHO Constitution leaves states the right to opt out of its regulations, a clear indication that the organization was not granted regulatory powers such as authorizing drugs and vaccines or supervising their manufacture. These areas remained the exclusive responsibility of states themselves, which also bear legal and public responsibility for the decisions of their national health authorities.

In recent years, the WHO has developed mechanisms that expand its influence beyond recommendations and, in effect, enable it to directly influence regulatory authorization processes within states. The central mechanism is the EUL, an independent WHO emergency procedure that is not part of national authorization systems.

Source: ZeroHedge News