The WHO is at it Again: Climate Change Repackaged as a Health Emergency

The WHO is dusting off the Covid playbook

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 the Climate Intelligence (CLINTEL) network, 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”.