What’s True and False in One Health

The One Health definition. CDC/National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases

Commentary

In the 10 days before the inauguration of Donald Trump, the bureaucrats were busy little bees.

One of the documents completed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was the first-ever strong U.S. commitment to an agenda called “One Health” that has come to dominate thinking in global institutions since the COVID years.

It is the “first-ever National One Health Framework to Address Zoonotic Diseases and Advance Public Health Preparedness in the United States.”

Did Trump know this was brewing? There is reason for doubt.

Looked at intuitively, One Health seems unobjectionable, even an improvement over looking at health purely anthropomorphically and mechanistically. It embraces what can be called a holistic approach, one inclusive of all life forms, and who could object to that?

And yet, it is easy to get carried away with this theory. The Lancet two years ago laid out just how revolutionary this is. We are told to be “as concerned about the welfare of non-human animals and the environment as we are about humans. In its truest sense, One Health is a call for ecological, not merely health, equity.”

Here we have a problem. It is contrary to all human intuition to be equally concerned for the life of a rat as it is to be concerned about the life of your daughter, as David Bell pointed out. We simply cannot be “equally concerned” about bugs as we are about Mom. This way is simply madness and would cause complete chaos in societies everywhere.

What’s more, One Health, as being imagined by the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations, and all the other well-funded globalist bureaucracies now rallying around this slogan, is nothing but a mandate for intrusive disease monitoring, testing, and ultimately jabbing of the animal and human population. In other words, it is a cover for what amounts to a power grab in the name of holistic health.

What are we to make of the CDC’s new commitment to One Health? The document was issued on January 10, and one might suppose that it would be jettisoned by the incoming administration. Not so. The PDF report is clearly dated February 13, many weeks after Trump took power and even after the United States pulled out of the WHO.

And yet the document assuredly commits the United States to working with the WHO:

“Recognizing the importance of international action, the U.S. Government works to advance One Health globally in partnership with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH)—known collectively as the Quadripartite—and with other international partners. Although the NOHF-Zoonoses is meant to guide coordinated federal activities in the United States, similar efforts are underway globally.

The document goes on to explain the 2022 release of the first One Health Joint Plan of Action, to create a framework to integrate systems across the globe in six areas to collectively address health threats: “Capacities for health systems; emerging and re-emerging zoonotic epidemics; endemic zoonotic, neglected tropical, neglected tropical and vector-borne diseases; food safety risks; antimicrobial resistance; and the environment. Once implemented, the NOHF-Zoonoses will enable strong, coordinated U.S. federal government representation to such global efforts.”

Yes, I know: your eyes have glazed over, and that’s part of the point. Be as boring as possible when you write up your plan to abolish human rights. All the better to coin incredibly opaque neologisms such as NOHF-Zoonoses, which stands for: “National One Health Framework to Address Zoonotic Diseases and Advance Public Health Preparedness in the United States.”

Anyway, what is the agenda and the takeaway here?

The document states its intentions: “Support One Health collaboration to identify, assess, and address the effects of environmental and social determinants of health, including climate change and environmental justice, on priority endemic, emerging, and reemerging zoonotic diseases and other priority One Health issues.”

What do environmental justice and climate change have to do with human health? Essentially nothing. Human health is about access to clean water, quality food, good medicine, and a happy life in a safe community. One Health somehow never mentions any of that but instead focuses on a nearly-nonexistent threat of infectious diseases in animals, which they want global agencies to monitor and stamp out.

If this follows the path taken with the Bird flu campaign, which has slaughtered 160 million chickens in the United States and forced registration and vaccination on fowl in the UK, One Health is an actual threat to human health insofar as it raises prices and reduces the food supply.

This entire scheme has all the earmarks of a power grab. Just on its face, it seems odd that the Trump administration would commit itself to working closely with the WHO of which it is no longer a member. It would appear that the bureaucracy here is operating in a rogue manner just as it did in the first Trump term.

We must recognize that Trump’s appointees do not have all power, all knowledge, and all ability to stop bureaucratic inertia, even given massive efforts and time and focus. It’s just not humanly possible. Adding to the trouble are the courts, which are litigating against the right of the president to change anything about bureaucratic functioning. The Trump administration is doing its best to clean up the issues but the problems keep appearing, seemingly out of nowhere.

I have no inside knowledge but it is likely a sure bet that absolutely no one associated with the Trump administration knew about this One Health plan or was following its progress. It just appeared seemingly out of nowhere, as signed by Casey Barton Behravesh of the CDC (who has been working with the WHO on this for 13 years), Lisa Branum of the Department of the Interior (since 2006), and Michael Neafsey of the Department of Agriculture (Assistant Director Plant Health Inspection Service).

Did they obtain authorization to release this report? Did they even believe that they needed it?

These are critical questions but, as of now, the United States is officially committed to working with the WHO to implement a bureaucracy-wide and global plan for One Health, which posits that human life is of equal value to all living things. It’s a radical theory, never once put before the voters in any kind of plebiscite because it would surely be voted down.

This comes at a time when disease mitigation is at a crossroads. The plan to lock down until vaccination was tried all over the world and failed. That exact blueprint will not likely be followed again in our lifetimes but there are other options to get control and obtain funding. Fear of the Bird flu is one path. Egg prices are still rising. Chicken slaughtering might have slowed but it is not clear. The mandates on flock testing are still in place and pharmaceutical companies are hawking every kind of product to the regulators.

One Health seems to have emerged as the theoretical vessel for launching the next round of infectious-disease control measures. The Trump administration needs to take it seriously and figure out what is going on before this gets out of hand. Any office in any bureaucracy labelled One Health surely needs a second look.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.