Beware the “Right to Health”
Originally published at National ReviewHealth and wellness are becoming the primary justifications for international technocracy, or “rule by experts.” Indeed, we are told that preventing the next pandemic will require that the World Health Organization be given the power to declare pandemics and impose emergency policies internationally. Anthony Fauci went even further, arguing that the U.N. and the WHO must be given great powers to “rebuild the infrastructures of human existence.” Imagine the authoritarian potential.
We have been told, also, that climate change is a health emergency that justifies greater technocratic control. So is racism. Ditto, gun proliferation in the U.S. And we can’t forget the threats to biodiversity. On and on the proposed policy imperialism goes. This is why the seemingly good-sounding proposal for an international “right to health” is such a trap.
As an illustration, the Lancet just published an article seeking to push this purported right into international law. Note the expansive scope of the proposal. From “Revitalising the right to health is essential to securing better health for all” (my emphasis):
The right to health is a duty held by all states under international human rights law and covers a range of entitlements, including available, accessible, acceptable, and good quality health care for mental and physical health, along with freedoms such as bodily autonomy. The right to health also extends to the underlying determinants of health—those factors, such as the rights to safe drinking water and to adequate food, which are integral to human dignity. Health is a fundamental human right that is indispensable for the exercise of other human rights and essential to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
That covers just about the entire range of contemporary international technocratic ambition, including the desire to do away with fossil fuels, establish worldwide abortion absolutism and a right to access “gender transitions,” attack the ability of meat and dairy producers to remain in business and family farmers to properly fertilize their fields (as we have seen in Europe, lately), etc. Indeed, the advocacy is steeped with a voracious technocratic grasping for power. To wit:
The report of the International AIDS Society–Lancet Commission underscores the centrality of human rights to achieving better health for all, discussing many of the key issues that require urgent attention. Newer challenges include the worsening impacts of the climate crisis and the potential harms emanating from digital technologies, especially generative artificial intelligence, which continue to advance in a regulatory vacuum.
Efforts to advance the right to health must also involve consideration of the impacts of commercial companies, given their practices that are too often inconsistent with their responsibility to respect human rights—for example, on pricing and distribution of medicines and vaccines.
Good grief. Under this guise, almost everything becomes about “health,” and authoritarian powers — such as the ability to suspend intellectual-property rights during a health “emergency,” as is already proposed — are justified under a so-called human-rights economy.
At the national level, embracing the Human Rights Economy approach—a concept that places people and the planet at the core of economic policy making—can promote investment in health care and other social goods.
A Human Rights Economy can also drive effective action to end power disparities—often the painful legacy of slavery, colonialism, and racist and patriarchal structures—that perpetuate discrimination and marginalisation, entrenching inequalities and inequities.
You get the drill.
Improving the world population’s overall health is certainly a worthy goal. But the “right to health” would redefine “health” and transform it into a pretext for an omnibus technocratic hegemony in our most important contemporary political and cultural controversies.
No, thank you.