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DIE WELTGESUNDHEITSORGANISATION VERSAGT MAL WIEDER: DIESMAL CORONAVIRUS

Letzte Woche, während des Weltwirtschaftsforums in Davos, konnte man den Generaldirektor der Weltgesundheitsorganisation (WHO) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noch lachend und entspannt über die Davoser Promenade schlendern sehen. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt sah die WHO noch keine internationale Gefahr in dem chinesischen Coronavirus. Trotz Berichten aus China von rapide ansteigenden Ansteckungen und Unklarheit darüber, wie offen die kommunistische Regierung in Peking mit den wirklichen Zahlen umgeht, gab sich der Chef der Genfer Behörde entspannt.

Mittlerweile hat die WHO ihre ursprüngliche Einschätzung der Lage revidiert. So wird nun weltweit von einem hohen Risiko ausgegangen. Geschichte scheint sich hier wieder einmal zu wiederholen, schon 2014 reagierte die WHO mit monaten Verzögerung beim Ausbruch des tödlichen Ebolavirus in Westafrika.

Die wichtigste Aufgabe der WHO sollte in der internationalen Bekämpfung von Epidemien gesehen werden. Doch leider verbringt sie zu viel Zeit mit Konferenzen und thematischen Auseinandersetzungen in ganz anderen Bereichen.

Nächste Woche tagt der geschäftsführende Vorstand der WHO vom 3. bis 8. Februar in Genf. Anstelle sich nun wirklich auf die wichtigsten Themen zu konzentrieren, wie zum Beispiel eine zeitnahe und fehlerfreie Antwort auf den sich ausbreitenden Coronavirus, zeigt die Tagesordnung dieser Sitzung, wie die Behörde Zeit und Steuergelder mit peripheren Themen verschwendet.

Die Tagesordnung verbringt eine ganze erste Seite mit Reformvorschlägen für Gesundheitssysteme hin zu universellen Krankenkassen. Solche Themen sollten zwar eher Teil von Innenpolitik sein, die WHO scheint aber ideologische Grabenkämpfe wichtiger zu finden als die globale Bekämpfung von Killerviren.

Auf den hinteren Seiten der Tagesordnung findet sich dann neben “gesundem Altern” und der “Renovierung der WHO Zentrale” auch ein Krisenplan für globale Pandemien.

Bevor es zu Krisenbewältigung auf der Agenda kommt, wird es wahrscheinlich erstmal einige Tage und die Bekämpfung von Patenten und geistigem Eigentum gehen. In den letzten Jahren hat sich die WHO zu einem zentralen Sprachrohr gegen Innovation und Privatwirtschaft gemausert. Die Verwässerung und langsame Abschaffung von Patenten auf Medikamenten sieht die WHO als bestes Mittel um steigende Gesundheitskosten zu verhindern. Dass Einfuhrzölle und Verbrauchssteuern auf Medikamente gerade in Schwellenländern oft 40% des Preises ausmachen, erwähnt die WHO lieber nicht. Allein in China geben Patienten über 5 Milliarden Euro pro Jahr nur für Zölle auf importierte Medikamente aus. Gerade in Zeiten eines massiven Virusausbruchs sollten solche unethischen Steuern in Frage gestellt werden.

Es war auch die Privatwirtschaft die parallel vier unterschiedliche Ebolaimpfstoffe in den letzten Jahren schnell und effektiv entwickelt hat. Ähnliches wird nun beim Coronavirus benötigt. Die Strategie der WHO Anreize bei der Medikamentenentwicklung zu entfernen könnte extrem negative Auswirkungen für die Weltbevölkerung haben.

Es wäre dem WHO Vorstand zu raten, sich weniger mit der Verschönerung seiner Büroräume auszusetzen, sondern eher mit der sofortigen Antwort auf massive Bedrohungen für die weltweite Gesundheit und globale Handelsströme, wie Ebola und das Coronavirus. Mit einem Budget von 2 Milliarden Euro pro Jahr und über 10% davon für Reisekosten veranschlagt, muss sich die WHO die berechtigte Frage stellen, ob die Behörde nicht massiv geschrumpft und auf ihre Kernaufgaben ausgerichtet werden muss.

Selbst als Befürworter des schlanken Staates sollte man die Notwendigkeit eines internationalen Koordinierungs- und Aktivierungsorgans im Bereich transnationale Epidemien sehen. Leider kommt die WHO dieser Aufgabe nur wenig nach.

Originally published here.


The Consumer Choice Center is the consumer advocacy group supporting lifestyle freedom, innovation, privacy, science, and consumer choice. The main policy areas we focus on are digital, mobility, lifestyle & consumer goods, and health & science.

The CCC represents consumers in over 100 countries across the globe. We closely monitor regulatory trends in Ottawa, Washington, Brussels, Geneva and other hotspots of regulation and inform and activate consumers to fight for #ConsumerChoice. Learn more at consumerchoicecenter.org

The World Health Organization fails us again: This time Coronavirus

Fred Roeder, Health Economist and Managing Director of the Consumer Choice Center

Last week when visiting Davos during the World Economic Forum, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization, casually walked down the main street of the small alpine town without a worry in his face. At that moment, his organization saw  no international threat in the Chinese-originating coronavirus. This was despite worrying reports from China and questionable legitimacy of the official numbers provided by the Chinese Communist government.

Since then, the WHO has apologized and corrected their initial assessment. The virus is now seen as a high risk to the East Asian region and globally. 

History is repeating itself once more During the Ebola crisis in West Africa in 2014, it took the WHO months to finally declare an emergency. They were too tied up in fighting non-communicable diseases. 

The most important task, and the founding reason, of the WHO should be combating international diseases and coordination of rapid crisis responses. But unfortunately the Geneva-based agency spends much of its time with topics such as road safety, secondhand smoke, vaping, and the renovation of their own offices.

Next week the body’s executive board will convene from February 3rd-8th. Instead of revamping their agenda and fully focusing on how to contain the coronavirus, the current agenda prioritizes many other points before dealing with an international crisis response.

While our taxes should be spent on keeping us safe from this virus, the WHO’s board will instead spend the first couple of days discussing ideological ideas of universal healthcare reforms in emerging markets and how to limit patents of pharmaceutical companies. This is apparently more important for an agency that spends 10% of its 2 billion annual budget than figuring out how to effectively combat killer viruses. 

Once you scroll down the agenda of the meeting, you will finally find crisis response next to topics such as ‘aging in health’ and ‘renovation of the WHO Headquarters’.

So instead of putting the very real and scary threat of the Coronavirus first, the board members will prioritize how to limit incentives for the private sector to come up with treatments and vaccinations for the virus. Scrapping patents and limiting intellectual property rights are key pillars of the WHO’s priorities these days. Limiting patents is seen as a solution to curb health costs in emerging markets. For the international governmental organization, this seems to be an easier way than actually calling out their member states who often increase drug prices by 10-40% through import taxes and sales taxes paid by patients.

Chinese patients alone pay over 5 billion dollars a year on tariffs for drugs they import. In times of a massive health crisis in China, the WHO should urge the Chinese government to drop all of these tariffs momentarily.

After the Ebola outbreak in 2014, the private sector quickly reacted and several companies developed and delivered Ebola-vaccines at the same time. Now we need a similarly quick response for the coronavirus. Therefore, the WHO should not limit the innovative potential of the pharmaceutical industry but encourage them to invest in finding vaccines.

The coronavirus has already taken too many human lives and the situation will worsen. International trade and the global economy can also easily take a massive hit from a worsening situation. Instead of debating how to make the WHO’s offices better looking for natural light, its board should focus 100% on how to contain and combat the coronavirus. That’s priority number one.

Over and over, we see how the WHO fails to respond in an accurate and timely manner to such pandemics. It is high time for the agency to focus on its core mission: Protecting us from trans-national diseases.

THAT’S A WRAP. DAVOS 2020 IS IN THE BOOKS.

This was my third time in Davos and I was excited to meet and listen to business leaders, heads of government, NGO’s and senior journalists from all over the world. Would I learn something new this time? Would there be justified criticism? Would environmental or anti-globalist activists dominate this year’s agenda?

Some analysts doubt whether Davos has the power to deliver the inclusive and sustainable solutions people and planet are craving for in the next decade. And that it is time for action. Not just words. The WEF’s traditional response to the criticism that it is just too easy to freeride at Davos, is that it needs to be a neutral platform, open to conflicting views, even to those who are resistant to its goals. As the WEF’s founder Klaus Schwab says in the recent new documentary “Das Forum”, “If you were a priest in a church, you would want to make the sinners come visit you on a Sunday.”

For this year’s annual meeting, the WEF tried to put their money where their mouth was. On the one hand, it invited a panel of teenage activists including 17-year old Greta Thunberg to open one of its main sessions on the current climate crisis. On the other hand, the WEF warmly welcomed US President Donald Trump as an opening speaker with an endless bombastic re-election pitch.

While it’s easy to poke fun at Davos as a talkfest of the corporate elite, there are many more platforms in Davos than those official gatherings highlighted by mainstream media. While there are only 3,000 official participants, 30,000 others participate in side events. Below you can find my personal top five experiences – for what it’s worth.

1.“We have shown that we can stop election interference and ensure privacy” (Sheryl Sandberg, COO Facebook)

It was great listening to both Sheryl Sandberg and Nick Clegg, the former UK deputy Prime Minister who is now responsible for Facebook’s Global Affairs and its chief lobbyist. Sheryl Sandberg and Nick Clegg spoke at a private event in Davos and revealed that Facebook is rolling out a new “privacy checkup” to 2 billion people to see how their data is being used.

Despite stories about hacking, lack of diversity and other issues in the industry, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg is optimistic about the potential of technology to improve people’s lives. She told attendees at a private event in Davos that the world is “in a clearly new and much more complicated age.” She said that while Davos historically focuses on economic security, she wanted to talk about how Facebook was chipping away at the problem.

We are democratising access for small businesses,” Sandberg said, citing an economic report that said 25 million small businesses led used Facebook apps, like Marketplace. The report also said Facebook created 3 million jobs in European economies.

While he acknowledged that Facebook did not know enough about removing bad content or preventing election interference in 2016, Clegg said. “We have shown in the elections since that we can stop election interference and ensure privacy.” Clegg was also clear in calls for greater government oversight. “We think there needs to be more constraints on companies like ours and more standards that we can all adhere to so we can decide together what is political speech, what is content that should be reviewed, what is privacy that individuals should have.” he said.

Despite what Sandberg called “major challenges” that Facebook is facing, she told attendees, “We think we are making progress because we are coming together and we continued willing to try our best to do more,” said Sandberg. “But when you give a voice to 2,8 billion people, some bad things will always happen.”

2. “The cybersecurity workforce is still too male and pale” (Jim Alkove, Chief Trust Officer Salesforce)

At the Invest in Flanders dinner, we had an interesting conversation with Jim Alkove, the Chief Trust Officer at Salesforce. Responsible for broad information management, privacy, fraud, abuse and reliability, he is the ambassador for the number one value at Salesforce, which is trust.

Jim Alkove explained how cybercrime is now a 5.2 trillion dollar threat to the world economy over the next 5 years. That’s the size of the economies of France, Italy and Spain combined. The good news is that a lot of this impact can be mitigated by an uptake in simple security hygiene like patching systems, software updates and implementing multi-factor authentication for users. The latter is often perceived as a pain for affluent users. But when we all first started using safety belts in cars, there were also a lot of people finding it inconvenient. Ultimately, we all know it is for the better.

Currently we are facing a cybersecurity skills shortage, equivalent to 3,5 million workers shortage worldwide by 2021. It is still a male and pale workforce. Salesforce is looking into how they can democratize the skillset and bring in a more innovative and diverse workforce into cybersecurity. They want to address the largest talent pool as they can, not just by traditional educational vehicles. That’s why Salesforce has built a cybersecurity Academy on their on-line learning platform. This allows everyone to come in and gain the skills they need to upskill and reskill into new jobs in cybersecurity.

3. Let there be light” (David Cohen, CEO Fluence)

For the 2nd year in a row, I joined the Cannabis Conclave, organised by the Consumer Choice Centre. They organised their summit again high up in the mountains, so I took the cable car to listen to the insights by some of the leading cannabis executives. The growing cannabis industry – both for recreational as well as medicinal use- is clearly one of the sectors to watch in the coming years. Participants were not only from the cannabis industry, but also included global investors, business journalists and policymakers.  The Consumer Choice Centre wants to use this event to fuel the legalisation debate globally and show the legitimacy and maturity of this growing legal industry.

It was encouraging to see that investors, thought leaders, researchers and public policy makers from all around the world (from Canada to Luxemburg to even China) are contributing to the growth of the cannabis industry. They ultimately serve consumers who are loudly demanding change to legal systems, health care and global sentiment. A better understanding of cannabis’ benefits has only helped as data and preliminary research continue to change the minds of even the most skeptical of skeptics.

One of the keynote speakers was David Cohen, CEO of Fluence by Osram (the German lighting company). In his illuminating keynote, he stressed the benefits of using LED lighting for cannabis growers. In the US -where it is legal to grow cannabis in an increasing number of states- 75 % of cannabis growers are now hinging lighting purchases based on energy efficiency and light intensity. His insights about the use of LED lighting confirm that the cannabis industry is taking a long-term approach for a stable, sustainable and profitable industry.

4. In essence, we are fueling a generation of change-agents” – (Noella Coursaris-Musunka, CEO and founder Malaika)

One of the most impressive sessions I attended, was a panel discussion full of strong women. Organised by the Global Citizen Forum and the Global Fund, this event wanted to explore the transformative power of education and healthcare and lay the groundwork of even greater impact. I was particularly impressed by Noella Coursaris-Musunka, the founder and CEO of Malaika. Founded in 2007, Malaika is impacting thousands of lives in the DRC through enhanced access to education, healthcare and clean water.  establishing a community-driven model that can be replicated on the global stage.

Malaika’s mission is to empower Congolese girls and their communities through education and health programs. This grassroots non-profit operates in the village of Kalebuka, in the Southeastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (Lubumbashi, DRC) and has changed an entire community.

An educated girl will increase her future earnings by approximately 10-20% for each additional year of schooling and will reinvest most of it back into her family and community. These are key factors in a nation’s socio-economic development, and yet girls still face immense obstacles in obtaining an education in the DRC. Malaika mobilizes resources so that these girls can receive the best schooling possible, providing them with greater choices, opportunities, and the capacity to make informed decisions.

Malaika’s goal is to build the leadership capacity of each individual student so that she gives back to her community and has a positive, long-term impact on the future of the DRC. “In essence, we are fueling a generation of change-agents” said Noella Coursaris-Musunka. At the same time, Malaika impacts the surrounding community through recreational and life skills programming for adults and children, as well as essential infrastructure development. With the exception of the locally hired Congolese teachers and support staff, Malaika is operated by pro bono experts and volunteers from the public and private sector.

5. Never eat alone” (inspired by Keith Ferrazzi)

For the third year in a row, we hosted a small dinner discussion in Davos, right after the traditional Belgian power reception with the Belgian PM Sophie Wilmes and King Philippe.

We enjoyed a warm evening reconnecting with old and new Belgian friends and 2 fellow Dutchmen. At the same time this allowed us to escape the speed dating madness of the Davos mountain. Itwas an informal evening with policymakers, business executives and opinion makers where networking took a backseat to fellowship and joy and a welcome opportunity to disengage from the hectic fervor of Davos.

What does it take to transform Flanders, Belgium or Europe in a more dynamic region? How do we create more wealth? How can we provide an answer to the challenges of the 21st century? In order to tackle these matters, we brought together a selected group of business leaders, policy makers and opinion leaders during a convivial Swiss dinner for an open discussion.

Concluding: nearly every conversation in Davos concerned either climate action or sustainability. That was made easier because going green is now profitable a lot of the time. The drivers for companies to become more sustainable are coming from everywhere – the science, initiatives from governments and regulators, increased consumer pressure and demands from investors. The best-prepared businesses see opportunities as well as risks and are preparing accordingly.

Never underestimate the power of talk, something at which Davos Woman and Davos Man excel. Davos can be more than empty words and gestures, if it helps to create a consensus about the need for collective action to tackle global challenges such as climate change. That’s what Davos is all about. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s called influence.

Originally published here.


The Consumer Choice Center is the consumer advocacy group supporting lifestyle freedom, innovation, privacy, science, and consumer choice. The main policy areas we focus on are digital, mobility, lifestyle & consumer goods, and health & science.

The CCC represents consumers in over 100 countries across the globe. We closely monitor regulatory trends in Ottawa, Washington, Brussels, Geneva and other hotspots of regulation and inform and activate consumers to fight for #ConsumerChoice. Learn more at 
consumerchoicecenter.org

Cannabis Industry Gathers In Davos: ‘No Silver Bullet Gets Rid Of An Illegal Product’

Cannabis Industry Gathers In Davos: 'No Silver Bullet Gets Rid Of An Illegal Product'

The World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, took place this week and alongside the main event there was a cluster of small cozy cannabis gatherings hosted in the Alps.

Switzerland is one of my favorite countries for a business trip and this week I experienced the ultimate luxury which involved sipping champagne and discussing pot – and the vibe was very much on point.

Business leaders, financial heavyweights and leading politicians from all over the world gathered to discuss key issues revolving around climate change and sustainable business. It’s estimated around 119 billionaires and 53 heads of state attended this year.

The Cannabis Conclave was a huge hit the previous year – an event hosted by David Clement from the Consumer Choice Center. The event was well attended by hedge fund managers and regulators, attracting crowds from Canada, Switzerland, Europe, Israel and China. Many discussions centered around the rapidly growing cannabis industry and how conservative countries are also adopting the recreational drug.

Canada was the second country, after Uruguay, to make cannabis federally legal and as a result took a cautious and in some times instances took a limited approach that has stifled both product availability as well as distribution chains.

What Can We Learn From Canada?

One Canadian government official at Davos who asked to remain anonymous explained: “Our federal government downloaded key aspects to provincial and municipal counterparts that created a disparate and disconnected set of frameworks creating confusion and a wide variety of structures across the country.”

He explained there has been clear winners such as Alberta that has a robust retail and production framework while Ontario has continually been lambasted for a slow and painful rollout that has reduced the success of legalization in the key market in the country.

“As a result we have clear winners and losers and there is much to learn from our experience. As the frameworks and mis-steps are remedied as like any new industry there will be meaningful lessons to be learned,” he explained.

He went on to add no country charting new ground has everything right and in some ways the black market has remained as vibrant as ever whose diminishment was the core cause.

“No silver bullet gets rid of an illegal product, but only meaningful policy that suits the customer and their wallet is effective and the correct approach, market forces should be listened to,” he said.

The Hurdles Of Cannabis

Over champagne, the official added a meaningful lesson for America is to ensure there are no disconnects between states and the federal government that currently persist that has limited proper regulation across the country and in particular created technical and practical problems for the legal industry that continues to give breath and vibrancy to the illicit market.

Stephen Murphy, co-founder of NOBL, highlighted the cannabis plant remains a great unknown with only 3% of the plant meaningfully studied. He stressed there is huge potential of the remaining 97% from a health, economic and social perspective.

Originally published here.


The Consumer Choice Center is the consumer advocacy group supporting lifestyle freedom, innovation, privacy, science, and consumer choice. The main policy areas we focus on are digital, mobility, lifestyle & consumer goods, and health & science.

The CCC represents consumers in over 100 countries across the globe. We closely monitor regulatory trends in Ottawa, Washington, Brussels, Geneva and other hotspots of regulation and inform and activate consumers to fight for #ConsumerChoice. Learn more at 
consumerchoicecenter.org

For the New Year: Some Fresh Thoughts on How to Tackle High Drug Prices

Some thoughts for 2020 what we need to do in order to tackle high drug prices.

The Deep State Will Challenge the New FDA Head

FDA

If we are to realize the kind of aggressive, innovation-promoting deregulation called for by President Trump, Stephen Hahn (FDA) will need to disrupt the agency’s built-in bias for overregulation.

Now that the Trump Administration’s new FDA commissioner, Dr. Stephen Hahn, has been confirmed, he’ll find he has one of the most difficult and important jobs in government. The FDA’s purview is wide, regulating pharmaceutical and other medical, food, and vaping products that account for more than 25 cents of every consumer dollar, over a trillion dollars annually.

Government regulation offers some reassurance to the public, to be sure, but when it is wrong-headed or merely fails to be cost-effective, it actually costs lives—directly by withholding life-saving and life-enhancing products, and also indirectly by diverting societal resources to gratuitous regulatory compliance.

Dr. Hahn is inheriting an organization that is huge, critical, and dysfunctional. The stakes are high. For example, FDA has pushed the average cost (including out-of-pocket expenses and opportunity costs) to bring a new drug to market to over $2.5 billion. That ensures that many new drugs will have a hefty price tag, and that others will never be developed at all.

Putting FDA on the right track will require toughness and discipline at an agency where more than 99.9 percent of the employees are civil servants who cannot be fired even for incompetence or insubordination. (Did we hear someone mutter, “deep state?”)

Government regulators have vast power and wide discretion; unfortunately, the incentives that guide them are perverse.

The late, great economist Milton Friedman observed that to gain insight into the motivation of an individual or organization, look for the self-interest. So, where does the self-interest of regulators lie? Not necessarily in serving the public interest, alas, but in expanded responsibilities, bigger budgets and grander bureaucratic empires for themselves.

Former FDA Commissioner Frank E. Young once quipped that “dogs bark, cows moo, and regulators regulate.” Consistent with that propensity, FDA has sometimes exceeded its congressional mandate. Regulators have concocted additional criteria for marketing approval of a new drug—above and beyond the statutory requirements for demonstrating safety and efficacy—that could inflict significant damage on both patients and pharmaceutical companies.

For example, they have arbitrarily demanded that a new drug be superior to existing therapies, although the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act requires only a demonstration of safety and efficacy. And Phase 4 (postmarketing) studies are now routine, whereas the FDA used to reserve them for rare situations, as when there were subpopulations of patients for whom data were insufficient at the time of approval.

The effects of FDA regulators’ self-serving actions range from the creation of disincentives to research and development (which inflates their costs) to significant threats to public health, such as the years-long delay in approval of a much-needed meningitis B vaccine.

Another egregious example of the impact of excessive risk-aversion is the sorry saga of a drug called pirfenidone, used to treat a pulmonary disorder called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), which used to kill tens of thousands of Americans annually. The FDA unnecessarily delayed approval of the drug for years, although it had already been marketed in Europe, Japan, Canada, and China. During the delay, more than 150,000 patients died of IPF in the United States, many of whom could have benefited from the drug.

Many years of fat budgets have enabled the FDA to waste resources. In 2017, for example, the agency sought public comments about its use of focus groups, claiming they “provide an important role in gathering information because they allow for a more in-depth understanding of patients’ and consumers’ attitudes, beliefs, motivations, and feelings.” FDA officials seem to have forgotten that their mission is to make science-based decisions—primarily about product safety, efficacy, and quality—as expeditiously as possible, whatever the public’s beliefs, motivations, and feelings may be.

A particularly dubious policy is the FDA self-declared jurisdiction over all “genetically engineered” animals. Subsequently, the agency then took more than 20 years to approve the first one—an obviously benign, fast-growing salmon—and then made a colossal mess of the five-year review of a single field trial of a mosquito to control the mosquitoes that transmit the Zika, yellow fever, dengue fever, and chikungunya viruses. Eventually, the FDA relinquished jurisdiction over that mosquito and other animals with pesticidal properties to the EPA, where they belong.

We need structural, policy, management, and cultural changes that create incentives for FDA to regulate in a way that is evidence-based and imposes the minimum burden possible. A number of possible approaches and remedies to accomplish that have been described, ranging from radical to more conservative.

Significant legislative changes, or even meaningful congressional oversight, would go a long way toward reining in an agency so culturally invested in more regulation. But political realities make this unlikely anytime soon.

If we are to realize the kind of aggressive, innovation-promoting deregulation called for by President Trump, Hahn will need to disrupt the agency’s built-in bias for overregulation.

Originally published here


The Consumer Choice Center is the consumer advocacy group supporting lifestyle freedom, innovation, privacy, science, and consumer choice. The main policy areas we focus on are digital, mobility, lifestyle & consumer goods, and health & science.

The CCC represents consumers in over 100 countries across the globe. We closely monitor regulatory trends in Ottawa, Washington, Brussels, Geneva and other hotspots of regulation and inform and activate consumers to fight for #ConsumerChoice. Learn more at 
consumerchoicecenter.org

Consumer Choice Center Launches 21Democracy Project to Counter Authoritarian Influence

Consumer Choice Center Launches 21Democracy Project to Counter Authoritarian Influence

Washington, D.C. – Today the Consumer Choice Center is announcing a new initiative aimed at countering the influence of authoritarian regimes on consumers around the world.

The goal of 21Democracy is to highlight the risks for consumer choice, privacy, human rights, national security, and intellectual property in the light of rising authoritarianism across the globe.

“The narrative of authoritarian regimes unduly influencing consumers and policies in liberal democracies is ongoing and we must be persistent in opposing it where possible,” said Yaël Ossowski, deputy director of the D.C.-based Consumer Choice Center.

“Whether it’s the actions of Putin’s Russia or the Chinese Communist Party, we cannot compromise the underpinnings of our liberal democratic systems in the face of authoritarian regimes.”

Articles on this theme have already been published in Politico EU and La Tribune.

Specifically, the Consumer Choice Center is deeply concerned about the threat the Communist Party of China (CPC) poses to consumers, particularly invasions of their privacy and intellectual rights. 

Too many western politicians and media figures have turned a blind eye to the threat that some Chinese companies, often de facto controlled by the Communist Party, pose to their constituents.

While we acknowledge the importance of global trade as a driver for consumer choice and prosperity, we also see the risk of this principle being hijacked by bad players. (Self-)Censorship in western movie productions and 5G networks being controlled by an authoritarian surveillance state are just two worrisome examples. 

Liberal democracies such as the EU, Canada, and the United States need to find a common approach to protect citizens from the rising influence stemming from authoritarian players such as communist China.

21Democracy aims to serve as a networking, awareness, and activation platform for combatting this threat to freedom. We will speak up when others stay silent, we build bridges between policymakers, business leaders, and government from liberal democracies, and we will lobby for policies that preserve freedom and individual liberties.

To begin these efforts, the Consumer Choice Center joined activists from Students For Liberty in Miami at the Atlanta Hawks vs. Miami Heat game last week to protest the NBA’s silencing of dissent of its athletes and coaches when it comes to the ongoing protests in Hong Kong. 

They chanted in solidarity with the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong and spoke with fellow attendees to disapprove of the league’s position on political dissent in Hong Kong.

More information about 21Democracy can be found on the website 21Democracy.com.

CONTACT:
Yaël Ossowski
Deputy Director
Consumer Choice Center
yael@consumerchoicecenter.org
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The Consumer Choice Center is the consumer advocacy group supporting lifestyle freedom, innovation, privacy, science, and consumer choice. 

We represent consumers in over 100 countries across the globe and closely monitor regulatory trends in Ottawa, Washington, Brussels, Geneva and other hotspots of regulation and inform and activate consumers to fight for #ConsumerChoice. Learn more at consumerchoicecenter.org.

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