(Brownstone Institute)—Public health has come into its own over the past few years; a once-backwater profession now promoted to be the arbiters of liberty and human relationships. Outbreaks of diseases associated with death at an average age of about 80, or even purely hypothetical, are now sufficient reason to close workplaces, close schools, upend economies and convince people to turn on their noncompliant neighbors. The result, while impoverishing the many, has driven an unprecedented concentration of wealth.
For the average public health professional, this new world order offers better opportunities. Once confined to writing training materials for clinic staff in remote forgotten villages or chasing up diarrhea cases from a local French deli, pandemics bring excitement, make headlines and generate good financial return for the sponsors, as well as those serving them.
Generating the fear and compliance necessary to build this new and somewhat parasitic model of public health has been no mean feat. For decades, life expectancies have been rising globally while infectious disease deaths have plummeted. With modern medicine, antibiotics and the broad immunity ensured by a century of global travel and intermingling of peoples, the old cadence of regular pestilential outbreaks was broken, with nothing of real note globally since the Spanish Flu back in 1919. This is not an easy canvas to work with if the public must be convinced that things are getting worse.
Covid-19, on objective assessment, should also have provided little help, having appeared just down the road from the only high-security lab in China where the same type of bat virus was being genetically manipulated. It was an unlikely candidate to support a narrative of ever-increasing pandemic risk from a nature abused by humanity. But a subservient media dutifully got behind such a story, proving that Occam’s razor can be dulled. While Covid alone could not support a long-term industry, it has served as a wonderful platform on which to build.
A Few Seeds Can Create a Harvest
The Covid-19 response did not appear from nowhere. A public health stream concentrated on catastrophic responses to rare public health problems had been growing parallel to orthodox evidence-based approaches for a decade. From 2018 the World Health Organization (WHO), with growing private funding, was working alongside CEPI, the new international partnership to use public money to develop private sector vaccines. Prioritizing vaccine-based responses to outbreaks, the WHO developed the concept of hypothetical diseases that could then justify investments of a magnitude that real world outbreaks could not. Covid-19 served as a template to see how such responses could be globalized, irrespective of individual risk.
If risk could be disconnected from reality, then the concept of diseases being existential threats to humanity could gain greater traction. This would then justify future investment that the self-appointed saviors of humanity may require. The exponential-increase concept, mainstreamed during Covid but actually illogical for disease outbreaks in which acquired immunity mitigates further threat, could supply the urgency needed to drive funding, and bypass laborious regulatory requirements. Any delay could be argued to be making matters exponentially worse. No national leader could survive the headlines such claims would generate. The pandemic industry, based on mirages but always retaining a kernel of demonstrable threat, had an almost unassailable business model.
The kernel of demonstrable threat is the reality that diseases happen, viruses exist, and they sometimes transfer from animals to humans. HIV did, so did the Black Death (Plague) and the Spanish flu. The reality that Plague and Spanish flu killed mainly due to a lack of antibiotics, and that HIV took decades to even come to attention in a remote area before modern diagnostics and communications, are irrelevant if the media chooses them to be so.
WHO and the Cartoon Industry
The old adage “A picture is worth a thousand words” is particularly relevant in an age when reading more than 280 characters is considered burdensome. The WHO, like other institutions trying to sell a message, understands this. The use of graphics can also simplify a message, reducing the probability that the concept being imparted is undermined by serious reflection. The recent WHO report ‘Future Surveillance for epidemic and pandemic diseases: A 2023 Perspective’ starts and ends with cartoons which read worryingly like propaganda (although the last, on page 105, seems perhaps too dystopian to sell a product). The WHO uses a graphic that superbly epitomizes the messaging behind the pandemic industry, its lack of rigor and integrity.
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We could also dwell on a different one (below) from the WHO’s ‘Managing Pandemics: Key facts about major deadly diseases’. But that would be silly.
Although the intent of the WHO with this childish graphic is clear, even this is contrary to their own evidence.
The graphic of interest is used in both the Future Surveillance and Managing Pandemics reports. Two versions are provided below; the original WHO version and a modified one that perhaps it would have used if trying to impart information in context.
The WHO, in noting the outbreaks in the first version above, ignores the fact that the pathogens involved, with a few exceptions, are not new problems. They have caused outbreaks for centuries and now cause much less harm than previously before. Of the three exceptions that appear newly arisen, two killed less people in total, globally, than 8 hours of one of WHO’s former priorities, tuberculosis. The other is Covid-19, which appears likely to have resulted from a somewhat inevitable mistake of the same pandemic-industrial complex that is now seeking funding to prevent the next one. The “mistake” part is why the Obama administration paused funding for Gain-of-Function research, on the understanding that accidental releases will probably happen.
Of the pre-existing problems in the figure, influenza caused the Spanish flu in the pre-antibiotic era, killing 25 to 50 million or more in a far smaller global population, while ‘Plague’ is thought to have killed a third of Europe during the Black Death. Cholera once devastated whole regions, and Yellow Fever caused devastating outbreaks that dwarf its burden today. The rest are viruses that have probably been infecting humanity for thousands of years but never in sufficient numbers to make a significant mark (Zika was in the news in 2016 because it finally reached the Americas, not because it was new).
The lower graphic, if extended backward, would somehow need to show a rapidly decreasing disease burden as sanitation, nutrition, and healthcare has improved, and risk therefore reduced. A very different picture than the artists seemed to be trying to put across.
Unfortunately, the misrepresentation of pandemic risk is not an aberration. Over the past four years the health industry has also misled the public regarding the requirement of vaccination to achieve immunity, the advisability of throwing poor people out of work in crowded cities to stop a respiratory virus, and the necessity of preventing young girls from going to school in order to protect their grandmas when this would inevitably increase child marriage and subsequent years of nightly rape and abuse. When an industry finds that misinformation pays, and the media abrogates their role of questioning obvious conflicts of interest, the pressure for honesty and integrity declines.
So, the reader is left to decide whether the misleading impression given by the WHO is accidental or reflecting intent. It is significantly funded by private corporations and investors who benefit from mass vaccination responses of the type proposed for future pandemics. These corporations owe it to their investors to promote such responses, just as agencies such as the WHO have a responsibility to combat corporate predation in healthcare. The above misrepresentations of pandemic risk are not isolated but reflect a theme among international health agencies. Perhaps public-private partnerships, inevitably subject to human greed, must always end up exploiting rather than serving the public.
Fairy Tales, Fraud, and Public Health
Does any of this really matter? Telling stories, or ‘telling tales’, is a pastime going back tens of thousands of years. Our culture is steeped in fairy tales, and they are good for teaching children some of the fundamentals needed to get by in society – how some people can be trusted, some not, and how some even set out to harm others. It is hard, however, to see that creating fairy tales is within the WHO’s mandate. Fairy tales, clearly labeled as such, may have a limited role in public health as a tool to encourage healthy lifestyles, but never to promote fear.
Inventing stories to mislead others in order to extract wealth is also an age-old activity. It can be fairly innocuous or even positive when entertainment is involved. However, deliberately misleading people for profit, under a false pretense of helping them, is usually characterized as fraud. This would clearly be off limits for an international organization or, ethically, anyone working in public health.
Inventing a narrative to deliberately lead people, countries, and organizations down a path that will harm them would be taking this subterfuge to a whole new level. Behavioral psychology was misused to spread fear during the Covid response under the mistaken belief that this was for some ultimate good – that scaring people would somehow protect them. But using it to actively harm most people to benefit a few, when your mandate is to help the many, would be fundamentally worse.
Diverting funds from high-burden diseases to Pharma profit is actively harmful. Children die from lack of medication when supply lines are interrupted, or because their parents are simply impoverished when workplaces are closed. Abuse of girls increases when schools are closed. Malnutrition will increase when markets are closed and tourism ceased. Health services will decline when resources are diverted to a new mass vaccination program for a disease against which the recipients already have immunity. Falsifying risk and imposing a response profitable to sponsors is beyond fraud when applied to public health. It is something far more malicious.
The WHO’s constitution holds that health consists of physical, mental, and social well-being. It holds, together with basic public health ethics, that communities be provided with accurate information, in context. These communities can then make informed decisions in keeping with their own culture, beliefs, and priorities. There is no way around this without abrogating basic public health ethics and the fundamentals of human rights.
Applying these principles to the management of outbreaks and pandemics, together with the far less profitable areas of global health, would be a good basis for pandemic preparedness. This would require honesty regarding pandemic risk, and regarding the far more serious health issues that harm and kill most people. It would require health to be seen in terms of the broad areas of well-being that the WHO once prioritized. Those of us working in the field know this. It is on us to decide how we apply this knowledge, and how we prioritize the welfare of others.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.