trustWHO – Who can we trust?

Wednesday, September 8, 2021

A friend pointed me to “trustWHO”, a documentary film directed by Lilian Franck. (spoiler: anti-vaxxers love it).

It lasts 1h25 and is an avalanche of impressive snippets that I would classify as high-quality journalist work. Many snippets are taken in the real world, not constructed. These meetings obviously happened really. I guess that the production wasn’t cheap and that the producers did it mostly out of personal motivation. I watched only the first 44 minutes because I got saturated. It repeats the same message again and again: something very evil is going on behind the façade of the WHO. Obvious conflicts of interests, lack of control and transparency, and the WHO answers basically that these conflicts of interests are unavoidable and that they are actually quite well under control. I believe that this film contains no made-up, tweaked or fake content. The question is whether it covers all relevant aspects of the topic, whether it reflects truth in an acceptably neutral way. At one point somebody says that “they” deliberately created a H1N1 epidemic when the predicted wave didn’t happen. And nobody speaks against this claim. Se non è vero, è ben trovato.

What alarms me is that the film is obviously underdocumented on Wikipedia. There is a page about its author Lilian Franck, which has one sentence about it: “In February 2018, Franck’s film trustWHO,[11] a report on the influence of privatised industry on the World Health Organisation, was released in German cinemas nationwide.” The only source mentioned on Wikipedia is the imdb, which provides the trailer and says that it was published in 2016.

The producer’s website OVALmedia GmbH seem to be ashamed of their work, you can’t find it in their portfolio. Actually their summary is still there, just a bit hidden, and the embedded video frame says that it is not available. It gives, by the way, a third date of publication: 2017.

On YouTube there is a message from April 2020 by producer and co-author Robert Cibis, who says that Vimeo deleted the film from their platform, stating that they do not support “Videos that depict or encourage self-harm, falsely claim that mass tragedies are hoaxes, or perpetuate false or misleading claims about vaccine safety. He replies that “trustWHO” has been “thoroughly researched for 7 years; it has been fact-checked and approved by lawyers, experts in the medical field and even by key executives of the WHO itself.”

But undoing a publication is of course impossible. You can watch the whole film on conspiracydocumentaries.com or on nutritruth.org.

One website publishes the same old summary in July 2021 under New Documentary on WHO Exposes Widespread Corruption, Massive Funding by Bill Gates. I left them a comment “But TrustWHO is not a “new” documentary, it is 5 years old! How can I trust a news article that starts with a flagrant example of propaganda rhetorics?”

Another site, collective-evolution.com summarizes some of above –in a quite biased way– and claims to be “the most comprehensive investigation into both sides of the vaccine debate.” Which is of course a symptom for non-reliability. Ironically they also advertize their new course ‘Overcoming Bias & Improving Critical Thinking.’

I guess that updating the Wikipedia article would be a waste of time, my change would quickly get reverted because all these sources can be considered unreliable: their publishers have no “reputation for fact-checking and accuracy”. For a primary research to become reliable, it must get reviewed (with a positive result) by at least one existing reliable source. Becoming reliable requires a lot of professional research. Professional research means that somebody pays your salary. Money rules the world. Wikipedia confirms this rule.

If you like conspiracy theories, consider the fact that OVALmedia is obviously getting quite famous among conspiracy fans. Vimeo maybe overcautiously decided to remove it, and the producer used this move to stage a censoring story.

Anyway… these observations make me doubt whether my plan for saving the world is complete. Something is missing when even a public corporation like the WHO can get jeopardized. Yes, a reliable world government could manage it all. But how can we protect that government from getting jeopardized? And who is going to pay the salaries of all those clerks?

Okay my God, it is not me who is going to save the world! I’ll leave that to you.