The World Health Organization (WHO) is considering a plan to ask governments to impose a global consumer tax on such things as Internet activity or everyday financial transactions like paying bills online.

Such a scheme could raise “tens of billions of dollars” on behalf of the United Nations’ public health arm from a broad base of consumers, which would then be used to transfer drug-making research, development and manufacturing capabilities, among other things, to the developing world.

The multibillion-dollar “indirect consumer tax” is only one of a “suite of proposals” for financing the rapid transformation of the global medical industry that will go before WHO’s 34-member supervisory Executive Board at its biannual meeting in Geneva.

The idea is the most lucrative — and probably the most controversial — of a number of schemes proposed by a 25-member panel of medical experts, academics and health care bureaucrats who have been working for the past 14 months at WHO’s behest on “new and innovative sources of funding” to accomplish major shifts in the production of medical R&D.

WHO’s so-called Expert Working Group has also suggested asking rich countries to set aside fixed portions of their gross domestic product to finance the shift in worldwide research and development, as well as asking cash-rich developing nations like China, India or Venezuela to pony up more of the money.

These would also add billions in additional funds to international health care for the future — as much as $7.4 billion yearly from rich countries, and as much as $12.1 billion from low- and middle-income nations.

But the taxation ideas draw the most interest. The expert panel cites a number of possible examples. Among them:

—a 10 per cent tax on the international arms trade, “which might net about $5 billion per annum”;

—a “digital tax or ‘hit’ tax.” The report says the levy “could yield tens of billions of U.S. dollars from a broad base of users”;

—a financial transaction tax. The report approvingly cites a levy in Brazil that charged 0.38 percent on bills paid online and on unspecified “major withdrawals.” The report says the Brazilian tax was raising an estimated $20 billion per year until it was cancelled for unspecified reasons.

The panel concludes that “taxes would provide greater certainty once in place than voluntary contributions,” even as the report urges WHO’s executive board to promote all of the alternatives, and more, to support creation of a “global health research and innovation coordination and funding mechanism” for the planned revolution in medical research, development and distribution.

Click here to read the executive summary of the report.

The WHO scheme to transfer impressive amounts of money, technology, patents and manufacturing ability to the developing world in a global battle to conquer disease looks similar in many respects to the calls for huge transfers of wealth and technology that were at the heart of the just-failed U.N.-sponsored conference on lowering greenhouse gas emissions at Copenhagen.

Indeed, the volume of revenues that the experts foresee from their global indirect tax — if it should ever be approved by enough national governments — might well come close to the $30 billion annual wealth transfer that rich nations approved at Copenhagen to hand over to poor countries until 2012.

But a global health tax would go one big step further. And, as the experts point out, one trail-blazing version of their global consumer tax for medical research already exists: a germinating program known as UNITAID, which aims to battle against HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

UNITAID, which began in 2006 and is also hosted by WHO, is financed in part by a “solidarity contribution” levy of anywhere from $1.20 to $58 on airline tickets among a group of nations led by France, Brazil, Chile, Norway and Britain. According to the WHO experts report, it has raised around $1 billion since its inception, with 13 countries having already passed the airline tax legislation and “several” others in the process of doing so.

The idea, as with the “indirect” taxes that WHO is about to consider, is that a relatively small consumer levy, once implemented, is a low-profile and relatively painless way to create a global health-care tax system.

UNITAID’s board chairman, Philippe Douste-Blazy, a former French Cabinet Minister and currently special advisor to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on “innovative financing for development,” is also a member of the WHO expert working group.

The global financial mechanism that the experts have been exploring is the keystone to WHO’s entire program for the transformation of the world’s health industry, which was endorsed as a “global strategy and plan of action” by the health organization’s World Assembly in May 2008.

The plan includes more than 100 specific actions across the areas of research and development, technology transfer and intellectual property rights, among others, according to an update that will also be presented to the executive board next week.

New regional and national networks for medical innovation and development are being planned in Asia, Latin America and Africa — where, for example, there will be “African-led product research and development innovation,” including delivery of drugs based on traditional medicines.

Another major effort is the transfer of technology to poorer countries to produce vaccines. One example: H1N1 flu vaccine, which is being manufactured in China, India and Thailand under licensing arrangements created under WHO auspices.

After WHO issued repeated warnings of a serious H1N1 influenza pandemic over the past two years, countries such as Britain and France ordered hundreds of millions of dollars worth of vaccine, only to decide that they were unnecessary, leading to mass cancellations of orders. WHO is reviewing how it handled the crisis.

According to the WHO update, the U.N. organization is already promoting transfers of new medical products for vaccines against rabies, even though that disease is now something of a rarity in the West.

A significant aim of the WHO effort is expanding production and distribution of remedies for what it calls “neglected diseases,” mainly meaning those that are more common in poor, underdeveloped countries than in richer ones. These include a variety of parasitic ailments, including trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness.

Behind all of the effort is the “persistent and growing concern,” as the expert’s paper puts it, that “the benefits of the advances in health technology are not reaching the poor,” which the paper calls “one of the more egregious manifestations of inequity.”

As with “climate change” at Copenhagen, the WHO’s experts see that health inequity as a malady that innovative and permanent forms of global taxation are just the right thing to help cure.

George Russell is executive editor of Fox News.

By Andrew Gilligan | Published: 10:55PM GMT 05 Dec 2009

Visitors watch a visual display about the environment before the opening of the summit in Copenhagen Photo: REUTERS

On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen’s biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the “summit to save the world”, which opens here tomorrow, she will have 200.

“We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention,” she says. “But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report.”

Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. “We haven’t got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand,” she says. “We’re having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden.”

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? “Five,” says Ms Jorgensen. “The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don’t have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it’s very Danish.”

The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to Sweden – to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.

As well 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists and 98 world leaders, the Danish capital will be blessed by the presence of Leonardo DiCaprio, Daryl Hannah, Helena Christensen, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Prince Charles. A Republican US senator, Jim Inhofe, is jetting in at the head of an anti-climate-change “Truth Squad.” The top hotels – all fully booked at £650 a night – are readying their Climate Convention menus of (no doubt sustainable) scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges.

At the takeaway pizza end of the spectrum, Copenhagen’s clean pavements are starting to fill with slightly less well-scrubbed protesters from all over Europe. In the city’s famous anarchist commune of Christiania this morning, among the hash dealers and heavily-graffitied walls, they started their two-week “Climate Bottom Meeting,” complete with a “storytelling yurt” and a “funeral of the day” for various corrupt, “heatist” concepts such as “economic growth”.

The Danish government is cunningly spending a million kroner (£120,000) to give the protesters KlimaForum, a “parallel conference” in the magnificent DGI-byen sports centre. The hope, officials admit, is that they will work off their youthful energies on the climbing wall, state-of-the-art swimming pools and bowling alley, Just in case, however, Denmark has taken delivery of its first-ever water-cannon – one of the newspapers is running a competition to suggest names for it – plus sweeping new police powers. The authorities have been proudly showing us their new temporary prison, 360 cages in a disused brewery, housing 4,000 detainees.

And this being Scandinavia, even the prostitutes are doing their bit for the planet. Outraged by a council postcard urging delegates to “be sustainable, don’t buy sex,” the local sex workers’ union – they have unions here – has announced that all its 1,400 members will give free intercourse to anyone with a climate conference delegate’s pass. The term “carbon dating” just took on an entirely new meaning.

At least the sex will be C02-neutral. According to the organisers, the eleven-day conference, including the participants’ travel, will create a total of 41,000 tonnes of “carbon dioxide equivalent”, equal to the amount produced over the same period by a city the size of Middlesbrough.

The temptation, then, is to dismiss the whole thing as a ridiculous circus. Many of the participants do not really need to be here. And far from “saving the world,” the world’s leaders have already agreed that this conference will not produce any kind of binding deal, merely an interim statement of intent.

Instead of swift and modest reductions in carbon – say, two per cent a year, starting next year – for which they could possibly be held accountable, the politicians will bandy around grandiose targets of 80-per-cent-plus by 2050, by which time few of the leaders at Copenhagen will even be alive, let alone still in office.

Even if they had agreed anything binding, past experience suggests that the participants would not, in fact, feel bound by it. Most countries – Britain excepted – are on course to break the modest pledges they made at the last major climate summit, in Kyoto.

And as the delegates meet, they do so under a shadow. For the first time, not just the methods but the entire purpose of the climate change agenda is being questioned. Leaked emails showing key scientists conspiring to fix data that undermined their case have boosted the sceptic lobby. Australia has voted down climate change laws. Last week’s unusually strident attack by the Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, on climate change “saboteurs” reflected real fear in government that momentum is slipping away from the cause.

In Copenhagen there was a humbler note among some delegates. “If we fail, one reason could be our overconfidence,” said Simron Jit Singh, of the Institute of Social Ecology. “Because we are here, talking in a group of people who probably agree with each other, we can be blinded to the challenges of the other side. We feel that we are the good guys, the selfless saviours, and they are the bad guys.”

As Mr Singh suggests, the interesting question is perhaps not whether the climate changers have got the science right – they probably have – but whether they have got the pitch right. Some campaigners’ apocalyptic predictions and religious righteousness – funeral ceremonies for economic growth and the like – can be alienating, and may help explain why the wider public does not seem to share the urgency felt by those in Copenhagen this week.

In a rather perceptive recent comment, Mr Miliband said it was vital to give people a positive vision of a low-carbon future. “If Martin Luther King had come along and said ‘I have a nightmare,’ people would not have followed him,” he said.

Over the next two weeks, that positive vision may come not from the overheated rhetoric in the conference centre, but from Copenhagen itself. Limos apart, it is a city filled entirely with bicycles, stuffed with retrofitted, energy-efficient old buildings, and seems to embody the civilised pleasures of low-carbon living without any of the puritanism so beloved of British greens.

And inside the hall, not everything is looking bad. Even the sudden rush for limos may be a good sign. It means that more top people are coming, which means they scent something could be going right here.

The US, which rejected Kyoto, is on board now, albeit too tentatively for most delegates. President Obama’s decision to stay later in Copenhagen may signal some sort of agreement between America and China: a necessity for any real global action, and something that could be presented as a “victory” for the talks.

The hot air this week will be massive, the whole proceedings eminently mockable, but it would be far too early to write off this conference as a failure.