Former Dutch Health Minister Ernst Kuipers, in his capacity as a member of the World Health Organisation’s Pan-European Commission on Climate and Health, declared last week: “The impact of climate change is enormous… so enormous that there is really no escaping it.” This statement, highlighted in a hard-hitting analysis published on Saturday by Marcel Crok of Clintel, perfectly captures the rhetorical strategy now being deployed by the WHO.

The WHO and aligned outlets like the Lancet are once again framing climate change as an “international public health emergency”, complete with dire warnings about heat-related deaths, extreme weather and the spread of infectious diseases. Yet, as Crok meticulously documents, these claims amount to “shameless climate propaganda” that conveniently ignores readily available data showing dramatic declines in weather-related mortality and vastly greater deaths from cold than from heat.

The timing is telling. Even as the IPCC has quietly moved away from its most extreme RCP8.5 scenario in preparations for its Seventh Assessment Report, the health scare machine is being cranked up to full volume.

The COVID-19 Model

H.L. Mencken, that most astute observer of the democratic follies of his age, famously remarked that the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. One wonders what Mencken would have made of the World Health Organisation in 2026, an institution that has perfected the art of the hobgoblin to a degree that would have made even the most brazen 20th century propagandist blush.

Following COVID-19, it was more recently bird flu and monkeypox, then it was Hantavirus and Ebola the past few weeks, and each of these is always linked to climate change in the legacy media. This week, the WHO’s Pan-European Commission on Climate and Health (PECCH) – a body convened by WHO Europe and chaired by former Icelandic Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir – declared that climate change in Europe must be treated as an “international public health emergency”. The Commission’s Call to Action, published on May 17th 2026, urges governments to formally have the WHO

declare climate change a “public health emergency of international concern”.

The WHO-declared COVID-19 pandemic during 2020–21 provided the perfect petri dish to convert fears of climate catastrophe into statements of public health. Epidemiological control over society represented the “final frontier“ for climate alarmists seeking to justify sweeping behavioural and economic controls of Orwellian extremes.

Dr Vanessa Kerry – daughter of John Kerry, the Biden administration’s special climate envoy – was appointed as the first-ever Special Envoy for Climate Change and Health for the WHO in June 2023. In her keynote address to the first-ever day dedicated to health at a UN climate conference (COP), Dr Kerry claimed “the climate crisis is a health crisis. And it’s killing us.”

In December 2024, WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus testified before the International Court of Justice that climate change is “fundamentally a health crisis” that is already “wreaking havoc” on human health and overwhelming healthcare systems worldwide. The WHO’s own fact sheet on climate change and health opens by declaring that climate change is “directly contributing to humanitarian emergencies from heatwaves, wildfires, floods, tropical storms and hurricanes”.

Catastrophe, crisis, emergency – the vocabulary of panic deployed with bureaucratic precision, amplified by a client mainstream media serving as stenographers. Nothing focuses the mind – or sways voters – like the fear of plague, famine or pestilence. Linking carbon emissions to personal health risks was always going to be a powerful tool for politicians, bureaucrats and their vast array of Left-wing billionaire-funded NGO allies. What’s striking in mid-2026 is how little the playbook has changed despite inconvenient developments on the climate modelling front.

The WHO’s Fear Campaign Gains Momentum

In recent months, Tedros has repeatedly described climate change as “in essence, a health crisis”. The organisation’s Pan-European Commission on Climate and Health has issued calls to treat it as a public health emergency, while a fresh Lancet study on European heat-related deaths has been widely cited to stoke urgency. Outbreaks such as the Ebola resurgence in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Hantavirus cases in parts of South America have been opportunistically tied to climate-driven ecological shifts in mainstream media coverage.

The message is clear: the climate crisis is making us sick and only co-ordinated global action under the WHO and allied leadership in the appropriate UN agencies and multilateral institutions (such as the WEF, World Bank and the rest of the captured institutions) can save us.

This is not subtle. The WHO emphasises increasing frequency and intensity of extreme events while downplaying adaptation successes. Bjørn Lomborg has rightly called recent Lancet work on heat deaths “textbook climate deception”, pointing out that observed increases are largely explained by Europe’s ageing population rather than marginal warming. The same Lancet papers the WHO promotes have elsewhere estimated roughly five million annual deaths globally from suboptimal temperatures – with cold-related deaths outnumbering heat-related ones by nearly 10 to one (and, what may seem surprising to many, far higher ratios in regions like Africa). Meanwhile, deaths from extreme weather events (hurricanes, floods, droughts) have fallen more than 97% since the 1920s, even as populations and wealth have grown. Population-adjusted risk has declined by over 99%.

Institutional Ambitions and Influences

The WHO’s enthusiasm for the climate-health nexus cannot be separated from its broader institutional incentives and funding realities. After the United States formally completed its withdrawal from the WHO in January 2026 – citing the organisation’s mishandling of COVID-19, lack of reform and political influences – the funding gap has been partly filled by private actors.

Chief among them is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation has provided over $5.5 billion in grants to the WHO between 2000 and 2024, making it one of the organisation’s largest contributors overall and a dominant force in global health priorities, particularly vaccines and infectious disease programmes. Through GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance – which Gates helped found and has heavily funded – the foundation exerts enormous influence over international vaccination policy and supply chains. Recent pledges, including $1.6 billion commitments to GAVI to offset cuts in governmental funding, underscore how Gates’s philanthropy has stepped into the void left by the US exit.

Critics have long noted the potential for such concentrated private funding to shape WHO agendas. With the US gone, Gates-aligned priorities – often focused on technocratic and pharmaceutical, “expert-driven” solutions, always profitable of course – gain even greater sway. This is particularly relevant as the WHO pushes the “One Health” framework that seamlessly integrates climate, environment, animals and human health into a single Orwellian governance domain. In May 2023, MEP Mislav Kolakušić (Croatia) said: “The World Health Organisation wants all countries to sign an agreement on handing over the authority to declare a pandemic, procure vaccines and drugs. It will be healthier and safer for humanity to sign an agreement with the Colombian drug cartel.”

Compounding these concerns is the documented influence of China in the WHO’s leadership. Tedros secured election as Director-General in 2017 with strong backing from China and a bloc of African and Asian nations. Beijing reportedly worked behind the scenes to support his candidacy over competitors such as the UK’s David Nabarro.

Shortly after taking office, Tedros publicly affirmed support for the “One China” principle. During the early Covid-19 outbreak, he heaped praise on China’s response and delayed critical actions – an episode that fuelled widespread accusations of undue Chinese influence. While Tedros has rejected claims of any “deal”, the pattern of alignment has been noted by close observers.

The Failed Pandemic Power Grab

These dynamics matter because the WHO has not abandoned its ambitions for greater authority. For years, it pushed a Pandemic Agreement (often called the “Pandemic Treaty“) that many feared would erode national sovereignty by granting the organisation sweeping powers over health policy, intellectual property and emergency responses during future crises. Intense negotiations and resistance from governments wary of ceding control ultimately produced a watered-down text that largely preserved national sovereignty. The WHO’s latest attempt to centralise global health governance largely failed to deliver the expansive powers the globalist insiders sought.

Covid and climate change have been the two great hysterias of our times, both sharing tactics of fear amplification, junk model-driven panic, suppression of dissent and justification of extraordinary measures in the name of public health. The climate-health linkage is only the latest iteration of this age-old pattern of authoritarians who claim expert knowledge to order people’s lives onto the road to serfdom.

The Evidence of Human Progress

None of this alarmism squares with the broader empirical record of human well-being. Our World in Data documents extraordinary gains: global life expectancy has roughly doubled since 1900; extreme poverty has collapsed from nearly 40% in 1980 to single digits today; access to clean water, sanitation, electricity and healthcare has soared; and deaths from communicable diseases have plummeted.

These improvements occurred alongside climate fluctuations and were powered by economic growth, technological innovation and affordable energy – most of it from fossil fuels. Indur Goklany’s extensive scholarship, including The Improving State of the World, demonstrates how fossil fuel-enabled prosperity has been the greatest liberator from Malthusian traps. Higher energy access supports better agriculture, refrigeration, air conditioning, infrastructure and disaster resilience – the exact factors driving down climate-related mortality.

Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb predictions of mass famine and collapse (famously illustrated by his apocalyptic visions of Calcutta from the vantage of a taxi window) were spectacularly wrong for the same reason: human ingenuity and energy abundance defied neo-Malthusian logic. Yet the spirit of Ehrlich-style environmental catastrophism lives on in today’s climate-health narratives.

The malaria precedent remains instructive. Once widespread in Europe and North America, the disease was eradicated there through drainage, insecticides, economic development and public health infrastructure – not by ‘cooling the planet’, whatever that means. In poorer nations today, restricting affordable energy in the name of climate goals risks reversing hard-won health gains far more than modest warming itself.

Hobgoblins and Human Flourishing

Climate changes (‘natural variability’) and human activities may both have contributed to climate change, but the data do not tell us by how much, as the physicist Steve Koonin has argued authoritatively. Prudent adaptation – resilient infrastructure, improved healthcare systems, technological innovation in energy and agriculture – makes eminent sense.

What does not make sense is the relentless campaign to portray every health challenge as another symptom of the ‘carbon dioxide crisis’, even as the IPCC retreats from its most apocalyptic scenarios and real-world data show humanity becoming far more resilient to environmental extremes.

The WHO’s leadership in this effort, amplified by influential funders like the Gates Foundation in the wake of the US withdrawal and shadowed by past controversies over Chinese influence, suggests groupthink and institutional incentives at work. Health scares justify growing budgets and policy influence. They also detract from the proven drivers of better health outcomes: prosperity, affordable energy and practical engineering. Health and human flourishing are not achieved through global targets set by ‘experts’ and ‘philanthropists’ like Mr Gates, or philosopher-queens like the unelected European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, pushing the latest vaccines, social media censorship and digital ID initiatives.

As Mencken understood, the mightiest hobgoblin is the threat to health. But the data tell a far more optimistic story. Humanity is healthier, wealthier and better equipped to handle environmental challenges than at any point in history (except for the shocks to global human welfare caused by the Covid lockdowns and, most recently, by the Strait of Hormuz blockade). Real public health progress has always come from technological innovation and economic growth, not from perpetual climate alarmism that demands we sacrifice development to meet abstract planetary goals. Policymakers and citizens should insist on evidence-based approaches that prioritise human flourishing over the latest iteration of the climate-health hobgoblin.