WHO Is Really Governing Australia’s Health System? The Hidden Network Inside Our Institutions — and Why Leaving the WHO Is Only Half the Answer
World Council for Health Australia | Club Grubbery Interview Feature
There are moments in an interview when something is said that stops you cold. When the pieces of a puzzle you have been assembling for years suddenly lock into place, and the picture that emerges is both undeniable and deeply alarming.
That moment came during a recent Club Grubbery interview with Lucinda van Buuren — registered nurse of 29 years, ethics advocate, and founder of World Council for Health Australia and World Council for Health Nursing and Midwifery. What Lucinda has uncovered through meticulous, open-source research is not conspiracy theory. It is documented. It is verifiable. And it demands a national conversation.
A Nurse Who Refused to Look Away
Lucinda van Buuren is not a political activist by nature. She is a clinician — a scrub and circulating theatre nurse whose entire career was built on one foundational principle: do no harm.
Her journey into this research began the moment the COVID-19 injection mandates arrived in her workplace. As someone deeply trained in values-based practice and medical ethics, Lucinda’s instinct was straightforward: read the documents. All of them. Study what you are being asked to sign up to.
What she found stopped her in her tracks.
She had already studied the TGA's own AusPAR reports —
And what she found there raised serious questions that nobody in the system wanted to answer. She knew the injections were listed on the black triangle schedule. She knew the TGA’s own documents stated the technology was new and not previously used in humans. She knew there were pages of listed unknowns. And she knew the provisional approval data was not due in until 2023. Her position on the workplace mandates was considered, principled and clear: “When the information comes back, I’ll review it. Then I’ll make an informed decision.”
This sparked her into action and inspired the first of many letters. She raised concerns through every official channel available to her — speaking up for safety, requesting risk assessments, writing to management, unions, the Nursing and Midwifery Board, and her federal health minister. She did everything the system asks of an ethical professional.
Her sister — who held the role of Patient Safety Officer, also submitted data showing 580 deaths already recorded on the adverse events register.
Not once did anyone in a position of power acknowledge either of their questions. And both were terminated from their positions.
This is how whistleblowing works in Australia. You raise the alarm with evidence. You are ignored. You are removed. And the system moves on as if nothing happened.
But Lucinda van Buuren did not move on. She started digging. And what she found explains — with extraordinary clarity — why the system behaved exactly the way it did.
The Network Nobody Told You About
What Lucinda uncovered — and presented to Graham Hood and John Larter on their Club Grubbery platform, with slides drawn entirely from publicly available WHO documentation — is a vast, institutionalised network of WHO Collaborating Centres (WHOCCs) operating throughout Australia and across the globe.
These are not fringe organisations. They are universities, hospitals, regulatory agencies, health ministries, national laboratories, military and bioweapons facilities, charities, and health professional training bodies — all formally designated by the WHO Director-General to advance WHO mandates and WHO agendas within their host countries. These are WHO tentacles embedded in institutions Australians (at least prior to the COVID era) trusted and continue to fund with their taxes.
The first WHO Collaborating Centre was established in Denmark after World War II. The network has been quietly expanding ever since. Today there are over 827 WHO Collaborating Centres worldwide. And Australia? As of mid-2023, Australia had 54 WHO Collaborating Centres — the highest number per capita in the world.
Let that sink in.
These centres cover an extraordinary range of functions: pandemic and emergency response, pathogen research and storage, vaccine development and patents, diagnostic testing, diagnostic coding, gender and sex education in schools, water, food, e-health, healthy cities, male contraception research and development, and the education of nurses and midwives.
And their work plans are confidential.
Freedom of Information requests filed by World Council for Health, World Council for Health Australia and World Council for Health Nursing and Midwifery — both domestically and internationally — have been largely stonewalled. The WHO’s own guidelines require that member institutions seek WHO approval before releasing information. Our regulators, it appears, must ask permission from Geneva before speaking to their own citizens.
AHPRA and the TGA: Conflicted at the Core
Perhaps the most explosive revelation in Lucinda’s research concerns AHPRA — the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency — and the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA).
AHPRA, which oversees the registration of every nurse, doctor, and allied health professional in Australia, was quietly designated a WHO Collaborating Centre for Health Workforce Regulation on 21 December 2017 — the same year Australia became the first developed nation to sign a WHO Country Cooperation Strategy, under Greg Hunt.
This was confirmed not by government transparency, but by a draft concept paper Lucinda discovered — the only WHOCC work plan she has been able to locate anywhere in the world. It states clearly that the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency, in partnership with the National Boards for Health Professions in Australia, has been designated a WHO Collaborating Centre for Health Workforce Regulation.
That means the body responsible for registering and disciplining Australian health professionals — including those who spoke out about COVID-19 injection safety — was operating under a WHO mandate, with its work plans approved by the WHO Western Pacific Regional Office.
When Lucinda wrote to her then-federal health minister, Dr. David Gillespie, asking whether AHPRA was a WHO Collaborating Centre, he replied that it was not.
Either he did not know. Or he did.
Both possibilities are unacceptable.
The TGA is similarly implicated, with two of its departments — including the unit responsible for vaccine quality assurance (active since February 1983) — operating as WHO Collaborating Centres. One of these, the Centre for Medicines Quality Assurance, was discontinued mid-term in March 2025. An outstanding FOI request to the TGA has been accepted and is awaiting response.
Meanwhile, in the United States, the FDA’s CBER unit — the very department that approved the COVID-19 vaccines — has been a WHO Collaborating Centre since April 1998. Its then-director, Dr. Peter Marks, publicly stated on 27 October 2021 “we pledge to do our duty to the best of our ability, independently and without conflicts of interest and we will be transparent about FDA decisions”.
He has since resigned.
Draw your own conclusions.
The Architecture of Control
In addition to the individual WHO Collaborating Centres in Australia which had been operating for a number of decades, an overarching group, the “Australian Network of WHO Collaborating Centres” was established in 2019, following a scoping phase led by the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services, in consultation with the Australian Global Health Alliance, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the Federal Department of Health. This was not accidental. It was deliberate infrastructure.
More Tentacles
Running alongside the WHOCC’s network is a parallel structure — the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) — with 26 Australian partner institutions currently listed, including the Australian CDC, the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, the Doherty Institute, the University of New South Wales, the University of Newcastle, Hunter New England Health, and the Health Security Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
And embedded in all of this is a communications strategy that WHO documentation explicitly describe as working “in close collaboration with colleagues at Facebook and other social media platforms to tackle misinformation” around COVID-19 vaccines, with partnerships measuring the “success of digital campaigns” on vaccine hesitancy.
Lucinda’s words in the interview were precise: “Its definitely science, but it’s political and social science that we’re talking about. It’s about behavioural science.”
This is not public health. This is behavioural management at scale — coordinated, funded, and embedded in the institutions of a sovereign nation without its citizens’ knowledge or consent.
These are the tentacles of the WHO and the United Nations, and they run through the very organs of Australian governance.
“Exiting the WHO” Is Not Enough
In January 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order initiating the United States’ formal withdrawal from the WHO. Following the required one-year notice period, the United States formally exited the WHO on 22 January 2026. Many Australians — and health freedom advocates around the world — cheered.
Australia has not been silent. Groups including Australia Exits the WHO, Stand Up Now Australia, the Aligned Council of Australia (ACA), Australians for Science and Freedom, the Informed Medical Options Party (IMOP) now the Heart Party, and World Council for Health Australia itself have been sounding the alarm — on the pandemic treaty, the IHR amendments, and the broader question of health sovereignty. A petition opposing the IHR amendments gathered over 1.2 million Australian signatures. Senators including Alex Antic and Malcolm Roberts have pushed hard for accountability in Parliament. This is a movement with genuine depth and reach.
But here is the uncomfortable truth Lucinda’s research forces us to confront: all of that advocacy was aimed at the front door, while the WHO’s network was already inside the house.
What use is leaving the WHO when the WHO is already inside your institutions?
World Council for Health, WCH Australia and WCH Nursing and Midwifery, wrote to the Trump administration in January 2025 — to both RFK Jr. and President Trump directly — on precisely this point. The message was unambiguous: you cannot truly pull out of the WHO until you identify, examine, and disconnect every WHO Collaborating Centre operating within your country’s borders. And that means Universities. Regulatory agencies. Health departments. Militaries and Non-Profits.
As Lucinda noted, America still has 70 active WHO Collaborating Centres — including, critically, the FDA’s CBER unit that approved the COVID-19 vaccines.
Groundbreaking WCH reports on WHO Collaborating Centres in the USA and UK have outlined the extent of influence these institutions have on the WHO’s global health security agenda — and vice versa.
This reciprocal influence is the heart of the matter. The WHO does not need your membership dues to shape your health policy, regulate your workforce, and manage your public narrative — if it has already designated your regulatory agencies, universities, and health ministries as its own collaborating centres.
Withdrawing from the WHO while leaving that network intact is like changing the lock on your front door while leaving every window open.
The same applies in Australia. The “Exit the WHO” movement has been important and necessary in raising public awareness. But awareness must now translate into a specific, targeted demand: full transparency and democratic accountability for every WHO Collaborating Centre operating on Australian soil.
What Must Happen Now
Lucinda van Buuren has done everything right. She raised concerns internally. She wrote letters. She filed FOIs. She shared her findings with unions and the Nursing and Midwifery Board. She sent information to senators. She has partnered with the World Council for Health internationally, including with Dr. Tess Lawrie.
The response from those in power has been, almost uniformly, silence.
That silence is telling.
We are calling on:
Australian Senators — particularly those with a proven record of hard questions in estimates — to urgently seek information on Australia’s WHO Collaborating Centre network: AHPRA’s designation status and work plans, the TGA’s FOI obligations to the WHO, the confidential 4-year work plans of all currently active centres, all discontinued centres as well as GOARN partner institution obligations.
The nursing and midwifery profession — to recognise that their regulatory body has been operating under a WHO mandate and to demand full transparency about what that has meant for professional independence — and for those who were silenced.
Every Australian — to understand that this information is not buried in secret files. It is on the WHO’s own website.
Watch this interview. Share it. Share this article.
This is about medication safety. It is about sovereignty. It is about whether the institutions Australians trust to protect their health are accountable to the Australian people — or to an unelected international body operating under undisclosed work plans.
As Lucinda said: “I don’t care if it’s a vaccine, a medicine, a procedure, whatever. It’s about safety. And we should all have that at the core of everything we do — to do no harm.”
Watch the Full Interview
The full Club Grubbery interview with Lucinda van Buuren is available now - WATCH HERE. We strongly encourage you to watch the full interview, share it widely, and forward it to your elected representatives.
Further reading:
Dr. Tess Lawrie — What Does It Mean to Exit the WHO? (February 2026): WCH reports on WHO Collaborating Centres in the USA and UK
World Council for Health — Open Letter to the Trump Administration on WHO Collaborating Centres (January 2025) - PDF VERSION OF THE LETTER HERE
World Council for Health Australia — Urgent Letter of Inquiry to Australian Authorities
This ends when people tell the truth — and when the rest of us refuse to look away.
— World Council for Health Australia
Lucinda van Buuren is founder of World Council for Health Australia and founder of World Council for Health Nursing and Midwifery. She is a registered nurse of 29 years specialising in operating theatre practice, medical ethics, and values-based healthcare and is founder of The Mindful Nurse Australia.
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Public Correction by Lucinda van Buuren - “In this interview I stated that the University of Technology WHOCC for nursing was the chair of the WHO global network for nursing. That is incorrect and I publicly apologise to all parties involved. The UTS WHOCC for nursing is the secretariat for the Global Network of WHOCC’s Nursing and Midwifery” https://www.globalnetworkwhocc.com/
Well done Lucinda. Please keep up the fight.
Bout time someone began to expose the many layers that have caused the medical professions to become ineffectual or, at worst, lethal. Thanks for this.