UN Secretary General Guterres Pushes Class War At Human Rights Council

In his effort to be “politically correct,” United Nations Secretary General Antonio Gutterres is completely off mark as it relates to vaccinations for COVID-19.

On February 28, 2022, Guterres spoke to the Human Rights Council that portrayed the fight for human rights as a problem of wealthy nations exploiting poorer countries. It’s a dangerous and naive sentiment which harms people everywhere.

In discussing the pandemic, the UNSG said:

“The pandemic is a clear demonstration of the universality and indivisibility of all human rights — civil, political, social, economic and cultural. The vulnerable and marginalized continue to suffer most. High-income countries have administered 13 times more doses per person than low-income countries. Vaccine inequality demonstrates an utter disregard for the human rights of entire countries and regions…. the unequal recovery from the pandemic has revealed the moral bankruptcy of our global financial system. That system has failed to protect the rights of millions of people in the global South. The pandemic has squeezed developing economies dry.“

This statement is a purely political one and cannot stand to the light of truth for a world trying to deal with a serious healthcare situation. Guterres attacked wealthy nations and accused them of “utter disregard” for poorer countries.

The fact is that COVID-19 was by-and-large a wealthy virus. The world’s poorest nations had very few deaths from the pandemic.

Country	rank (poorest)	deaths per im	Rank (deaths)
Burundi	1	3	213
Somalia	2	81	178
Mozambique	3	67	184
Madagascar	4	47	190
Sierra Leone	5	15	202
Afghanistan	6	189	152
CAR	7	23	199
Liberia	8	56	187
Niger	9	12	208
DR Congo	10	14	203

Poorest nations faired the best in the pandemic. Stats from Worldometer March 2, 2022

The global average number of deaths from COVID-19 was 768 per million as of March 2, 2022. The poorest nations came nowhere near that rate of death. The pandemic wreaked havoc in eastern Europe, with Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Georgia, Croatia, Czechia, Slovakia and Romania each having between 3,300 and 5,200 deaths per 1 million, a rate roughly 75 times suffered by the poorest countries. Consider that the GNI per capita of Bulgaria is $9,540, or 35 times that of Burundi ($270), while the rate of death is 1,731 times as high (5,194 to 3 per 1 million population).

Why condemn the wealthier countries which developed the vaccine that have populations dying at much higher rates, for not shipping off all the vaccines to poorer countries where the people are barely impacted by the virus? It’s nonsensical on a factual level, and insidious on a political level.

The dishonest and dangerous socialist worldview is permeating the United Nations, condemning the rich, dying Europeans and demanding a transfer of wealth and work product to poorer African countries.

Guterres continued on this theme when he condemned wealthy countries for causing climate change for which the poorer nations pay the price, saying “a few countries are trampling on the rights of the rest of the world. A few companies are reaping rich rewards, while ignoring the rights of the poorest and most vulnerable.“

While it is true that wealthy countries have factories and industry that cause pollution, the vast majority of the global problem is caused by a single country, China, with more than 10,065 million tons of CO2 released or as much as the United States, India, Russia and Japan combined. But the small wealthy island of Bermuda (presumably very impacted by climate change) is 11 times as wealthy as polluting China ($117,740 versus $10,610). Iceland is 7 times as wealthy as Russia ($72,930 versus $10,690), and Ireland is 33 times as wealth as India ($63,470 versus $1,900).

*Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks during the High Level Segment of the 37th Session of the Human Rights Council. 26 February 2018.*

Guterres used incendiary language for wealthy countries calling out “utter disregard for the human rights of entire countries and regions” and “the moral bankruptcy of our global financial system,” but couldn’t utter a negative word to China regarding its vast human rights abuses including the detention of Uyghurs, the suppression of basic human rights of expression and freedom of the press.

The UN Secretary General went to the Human Rights Council (which includes some of the worst human rights abusing countries such as China, Cuba, Russia, Somalia and Venezuela), to condemn wealth rather than human rights abuses. In doing so, he absolved the poor autocracies that crush individual rights, echoing the socialist call for a global “class war.“