A WHO press release dated 17 May 2026, ‘coincidentally’ or not, was released just one day before the 79th World Health Assembly (WHA) took place 18-23 May 2026 in Geneva, Switzerland — reporting what the WHO claimed — as recently as 13 June — is an especially serious Ebola virus outbreak in Central Africa’s Democratic Republic of the Congo and across the border in Uganda to the east.
The release stresses that an all-important classification of an outbreak, officially called a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), definitely applies in this case. Here are some excerpts of that media bulletin, which begins with a reference to a section of the WHO’s International Health Regulations (IHR):
Pursuant to paragraph 2 of Article 12 — Determination of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, including a pandemic emergency of the International Health Regulations (IHR) — the Director-General of the World Health Organization, after having consulted the States Parties where the event is known to be currently occurring, is hereby determining that the Ebola disease caused by [the rare] Bundibugyo [virus strain] in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda constitutes a [PHEIC] but does not meet the criteria of pandemic emergency, as defined in the IHR.
It’s important to clarify upfront that Ebola has never been cited as the cause of a pandemic. It’s understood to be transmitted only through direct contact with infected human bodily fluids (via broken skin, mucous membranes, etc.) such as blood, urine, faeces, saliva, sweat, breast milk, and vaginal fluid — although, according to orthodox medical literature, it’s not necessarily limited to intimate contact. There are six known Ebola strains, although only four can cause sickness in humans.
So, while an epidemic — which is a local or regional outbreak — has already been declared in those parts of Africa, a pandemic, defined by the medical establishment as a highly transmissible airborne pathogen outbreak that affects multiple nations, on either a near-global or worldwide scale, seems unlikely now.
Yet, while the WHO’s ‘global risk’ rating for Ebola has been reported as ‘low’, national and regional risks are being deemed quite high in Africa, even as the WHO expresses considerable concern that “there are no approved vaccines or therapeutics” for this Ebola strain.
On that note, the above-quoted WHO press release goes on to portray the reported Ebola outbreak as a serious epidemic with urgent and broader implications, as summarised by the following statement:
The [current Ebola] event constitutes a public health risk to other States Parties through the international spread of disease. International spread has already been documented … Neighboring countries sharing land borders with the Democratic Republic of the Congo are considered at high risk for further spread due to population mobility, trade and travel linkages, and ongoing epidemiological uncertainty. The event requires international coordination and cooperation to understand the extent of the outbreak, to coordinate surveillance, prevention and response efforts, to scale up and strengthen operations and ensure ability to implement control measures.
Strong Vaccine Incentive
Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance — an organisation that gives Big Pharma a governmental policy inroad for developing new vaccines — is one of the partner institutions in the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, or GOARN, a branch of the WHO that apparently does not get much press.
There’s a total of 360 such partner organisations, including the US’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), along with several UK entities, including the UK Public Health Rapid Support Team and Imperial College London. GOARN partners also include “specialised bio-medical labs”, as GOARN lists them, and various other academic centres and universities.
Within GOARN, there is a Steering Committee comprised of 21 partner institutions, and a Secretariat that’s directly coordinated by an operational support team based at the WHO’s Geneva Headquarters. The Steering Committee’s membership includes China’s own CDC, Europe’s CDC, the Public Health Agency of Canada, the UK Health Security Agency, the Robert Koch Institute of Germany, UNICEF, and other notables, such as UN partner NGOs.
Irrespective of the extent or seriousness of the Ebola outbreak, the key issue here is the apparent vaccine development-related exploitation of Africa’s Ebola situation, fuelled by the strong implication that vaccines — which by their very nature are fraught with risks and uncertainties — are the only answer to fighting Ebola and myriad other diseases. Ending war, improving public sanitation and hygiene, improved water supplies, upgrading agriculture, achieving better nutrition, and various other measures appear to have been deemed unworthy of serious consideration, much less investment.
A lead article on Gavi’s website notes:
The deadly Bundibugyo ebolavirus outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda has exposed an urgent global need: there are no licensed vaccines targeting Bundibugyo virus and, until this outbreak was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, there were none at an advanced stage of development.
Gavi added:
This lack of medical tools to counter a viral disease that kills so many of the people it infects is not down to poor scientific knowledge or limited technological innovation. It’s a clear-cut case of market failure.
While Bundibugyo is an extremely deadly disease, outbreaks are rare and sporadic. This means that while they can devastate communities and destroy people’s lives, they don’t create predictable markets for vaccine developers.
Instead, manufacturers face a very high risk that any research and development investment they make could cost them dearly with uncertain demand, no guaranteed buyers and no commercial return [emphasis added].
So, companies don’t invest. And the world is left facing each new outbreak as unprepared as it was for the last.
Meanwhile, Gavi has announced a plan, in conjunction with an allied organisation, to do a full-court press, what one might call ‘vaccines or bust!’ As the same Gavi article goes on to say:
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance have launched a combined ‘push-pull’ financing strategy designed to fix this market failure, with a new business model for epidemic vaccine development.
The ‘push’ is CEPI’s role. The coalition has announced more than US$ 60 million in urgent investments to advance a portfolio of Bundibugyo vaccine candidates using three separate vaccine platform approaches.
Those three platforms, as described by Gavi, include the technology behind established Covid jabs. They are:
- rVSV viral vector. “This approach uses the same vaccine platform used to develop the highly effective licensed vaccine against Zaire ebolavirus … At this stage, this option has the strongest preclinical evidence, although no Bundibugyo-specific rVSV vaccine has been tested in people”.
- ChAdOx viral vector. “This approach uses the same technology that underpinned the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine and offers the strongest potential for rapid manufacturing and scale-up. However there is currently very limited Bundibugyo-specific preclinical data, with key studies currently underway”.
- mRNA platform. “This third approach, validated during the COVID-19 pandemic as a safe, fast, flexible and scalable vaccine technology, uses a synthetic molecule known as messenger RNA to tell the body’s own cells to produce the antigen. It also offers a very rapid path from vaccine design to manufacturing”.
‘Pathogen’ of Power?
Meanwhile, as Covid-era technology is being re-directed, as described above, for an Ebola outbreak that creates the ‘market’, Big Pharma needs to crowd out all other possible approaches to maintaining and improving the health and lives of the African people, the WHO may amass more power, depending on how things such as the WHO Pandemic Agreement pan out in the months ahead.
Interestingly, the concept of a ‘pandemic emergency’ has been made into a specific tier of a PHEIC. The US National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine (NIH-NLM) released a paper on 29 August 2025 which argues that fairly recent amendments made to the IHR — amendments that enabled a pandemic emergency declaration to become a tier of PHEIC in the first place — were a good idea, amid indications that the WHO will amass more power in the process.
The paper goes on to say that if the WHO ever fully finalises the embattled WHO Pandemic Agreement, sometimes called the Pandemic Treaty, that would magnify the WHO’s authority even more, via this pandemic emergency-PHEIC legal linkage.
The NIH-NLM paper states:
The binary nature of a [PHEIC alert] was brought to attention during COVID-19, with the COVID-19 IHR Emergency Committee and some States Parties advocating for an intermediate or regional tier of warning. However, the recent amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) yielded an unexpected outcome: no proposed lower tier was added to the binary alert framework; instead, ‘pandemic emergency’ was introduced as a tier of alert within the PHEIC framework.
The formalisation of a de facto determination of pandemic emergency results in a de jure expansion of the World Health Organization’s emergency powers, demonstrating what is often termed as a ‘ratchet effect’.
Notably, ‘de jure’ means ‘by law’ and describes a state of affairs in accordance with the law or official rules.
The same paper continues:
Moreover, the amended IHR grant the World Health Organization (WHO) enhanced legal competences, notably in a binding way. The adoption of the [WHO] Pandemic Agreement could further extend the legal implications of the WHO’s power to determine a pandemic emergency.
2026 WHA Aftermath
In other news, regarding the just-concluded World Health Assembly (WHA), a reassuring development is that the WHO’s sustained effort over the last several years to finalise the WHO Pandemic Agreement appears to have stalled.
The British Medical Journal recently commented on the situation:
WHO member states have failed to agree on a fundamental part of the pandemic accord ... leaving the landmark accord in limbo. Despite nine months of negotiations, WHO members were unable to agree on the terms of the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing [PABS] Annex. This was the final key component of the pandemic accord that would outline how the benefits from [medical] products, created using shared pathogen data, should be distributed.
Still, the agreement’s viability could change on relatively short notice, given the momentum tyrannical movements acquire when backed by the bloated fortunes of transgenerational power brokers in tandem with Big Pharma.
For the record, member states at this year’s WHA adopted over 20 decisions and 13 resolutions.
For example, the assembly laid the groundwork for integrating digital health and AI. The same goes for what’s known as ‘pharmacovigilance’, defined as monitoring the safety of vaccines and health technologies. A new resolution was adopted to advance such monitoring, which, by the way, oversees ‘vaccine safety’ only after the jabs have been clinically tested, which itself is typically sub-par, and are already available in the marketplace while being administered to the public.
The WHA, in this ‘pharmacovigilance’ context, also seeks to counter so-called health ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’, which, of course, means to dodge or sometimes attack any narrative that challenges the WHO’s judgement or priorities.
Furthermore, ‘global health architecture’ reforms were agreed upon at the WHA. Member states reportedly reached a consensus to modernise how the world prepares for, and responds to, health threats by better-aligning regional capacities.
Additionally, the above-noted decisions and resolutions also covered things like stroke, liver disease, tuberculosis, emergency care, and antimicrobial resistance, among various other matters, including the adoption of the ‘Draft Strategy on the Economics of Health for All (2026-2030)’, according to a lengthy 23 May post-WHA news release from the WHO.
That health-economics strategy seeks to “[align] economic systems with health, equity and sustainable development”, the release also states. And while the WHO stressed at the WHA’s conclusion that “health and economic prosperity are deeply interconnected”, meaning economic policy should be more people-centric via an economy that “both serves and benefits from the achievement of health for all”, the key question is what is meant by “health for all” and by what means it’s achieved.
To be sure, a less stressful, more rewarding and democratic economic order would be a welcome and health-enhancing thing, yet an extreme over-dependency on hazardous and potentially deadly vaccines, merged with the WHO’s apparent efforts to get more power, could quickly overturn whatever benefits an economic-health alignment may achieve.
Public Action Can Be Effective
Thanks largely to the efforts, often against formidable odds, of vaccine choice and alternative health individuals, groups, and organisations, including sceptical and vigilant alternative news outlets such as UK Column, significant public opposition and political pressure have contributed to the ‘watering down’ and delays of the Pandemic Treaty. The WHO and its allied agencies call this effective opposition ‘misinformation’, while others call it the fruits of free speech.
Apparently undeterred, the WHO is trying to maintain the agreement’s momentum, with Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urging WHO member countries to keep working with urgency despite the delays, especially now with the announced Ebola outbreak, which comes following the hantavirus cruise ship outbreak, as well as bird flu, monkeypox and other health threats that the WHO has periodically announced as potential or actual epidemic/pandemic candidates.
A version of the WHO Pandemic Agreement was adopted in May 2025. But adoption does not mean the pact has been finalised or implemented. Negotiations have been fraught with gridlock. So, while an attempted finalisation of the treaty may not come until at least May 2027, it remains to be seen exactly how this Ebola matter will affect the ‘metrics’ of the situation.
