After several weeks of passive-aggressive bickering, Russia and the WHO are unfortunately still “an item” and they may even take their calamitous relationship to the next level: clot-shot certification.
Gross.
Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 18, Melita Vujnovic, WHO representative to Russia, announced that negotiations between the World Health Organization and the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) concerning recognition of Sputnik V were back on track.
An inspection of manufacturing facilities in Russia could happen in the coming months, according to Vujnovic.
“Cooperation goes on despite difficult moments. The World Health Organization is a platform for multilateral cooperation on the topic of health, and our main task is to remove all barriers, all obstacles to scientific and practical cooperation,” the WHO representative said.
This is great news for RDIF, which partnered with shady pill-peddlers and AstraZeneca to make Sputnik V accessible to the whole world, and also to make mountains of rubles. There are currently 100 million doses of the safe and effective unproven genetic slurry rotting in Russian warehouses, so time is of the essence.
But as a science-backed precautionary measure, manufacturers have “extended the shelf life” of the drug. That’s directly from TASS, by the way:
But back to the Relationship Status.
A day earlier, on June 17, Vujnovich revealed that the WHO, despite earlier threats, would not be closing its office in Moscow.
“The WHO country office is here, has not gone anywhere, is not going anywhere and continues normal work,” she said.
We won’t lie: if you were expecting Russia to leave the WHO in the near future, you might have to keep waiting. You might be waiting for a very long time, actually.
On June 16, Hans Kluge, WHO regional director for Europe, participated in a SPIEF panel discussion about how to inject the masses with “next-generation” vaccines. Mikhail Murashko, Russia’s health minister and a member of the WHO’s Executive Board, was a fellow panelist.
Even Dr. Tedros made an appearance at SPIEF (via webcam) but we are saving details about this historic event for a separate blog post.
Meanwhile, Murashko can’t stop talking about monkey-shots and the WHO’s “leading role” in “global health governance.”
Russia’s health minister made the above statement about two weeks after the WHO passed a resolution condemning Russia for “causing a serious impediment to the health of the population of Ukraine, as well as having regional and wider than regional health impacts.”
However, there was a brief moment of sanity when Russia’s deputy minister of health, Alexandra Dronova, spoke at the 75th World Murder Assembly last month.
“We support joint work to strengthen the global health architecture. It must be based on the principles of consensus, transparency, impartiality. The development of a new WHO international pandemic response tool and making specific changes to the International Health and Sanitation Rules should not violate the sovereign right of countries to determine a set of emergency response measures and on their territory,” Dronova said during her speech.
(She also said: “The countries of the world were able to overcome the acute phase of the pandemic with a collective effort under the coordinating role of the World Health Organization.” Sigh.)
But even this pushback didn’t seem to fundamentally change anything. As Politico reported on May 28, a compromise was reached by WHO members concerning proposed changes to the IHR:
The World Health Assembly — the annual meeting of WHO member countries — adopted a U.S.-led resolution that sets the timeline for amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) to come into force. The resolution was nearly scuppered after several countries including the Africa group, indicated that they had reservations about it.
In general, the situation is less than stellar.
Article cross-posted from Off-Guardian.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
