Biden Amendments Would Greatly Expand WHO’s Powers
As the World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the WHO, gathered in Geneva this week to discuss potential amendments to the International Pandemic Treaty and other issues, a passionate backlash erupted from critics who slammed the event as an audacious power grab by the WHO, in league with the Biden Administration.
The firestorm centered on a packet of amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) that form the core of the existing Pandemic Treaty, crafted in 2021 to unite world governments in preparing for future pandemics.
The amendments were submitted to the WHO in January by the White House, which then persuaded 47 other nations, including the 27 EU members, Canada, Britain Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and a host of Latin American countries to give their approval prior to this week’s Geneva summit.
The administration’s negotiations with other governments were conducted below the radar during the past few months; the White House made no official statement nor held a single press conference about them. Until April 12, the contents of the amendments themselves were largely under wraps.
But once they became public, the administration’s bid to significantly expand WHO’s power through the amendments triggered an uproar from GOP leaders in the United States and a host of critics and dissenters in other democratic nations.
If these amendments are approved by the majority of the 570 delegates at the conference, say experts, the WHO will have the power to unilaterally declare an “international health emergency” in any country among its membership, nullifying the powers of individual national governments.
WHO will have the right, backed by international law, to mandate in the targeted country with or without the country’s consent, an entire array of pandemic restrictions including lockdowns, quarantines, forced vaccines, school closings, mask-wearing and other measures.
Surrendering U.S. Sovereignty?
Critics are outraged that the Biden amendments would allegedly surrender national sovereignty and authority for public health decisions to the WHO, an organization widely believed to be controlled by China.
[The fact that Taiwan is the only WHO member nation who is barred from the summit speaks volumes about China’s level of control over the organization. This year as every year, Taiwan petitioned the world body to be allowed to join, at least as an observer, but was once again denied.]
The Biden-backed amendments, if adopted, would bring the United States under the subjugation of foreign powers, critics say, for any issue that WHO “experts” have the legal right to label a “public health emergency.” This critical term is left undefined in the text of the amendments, which allows the WHO to interpret it as it sees fit.
Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, or whoever would be the current mouthpiece for the world body, would be legally entitled to step in and impose public health mandates on the American people for any “health emergency” he decided to call out, even against the wishes of the government and its populace.
In addition, under the amendments, the WHO will require member nations to establish a Compliance Department that could be used to bully states that don’t cooperate. Nations whose governments failed to heed UN body’s mandates would be subject to fines and sanctions.
“We have already seen the abuse of power under Joe Biden by the Centers for Disease Control, which the courts have fortunately blocked. Americans would have very little recourse against the WHO. America must not give up its sovereignty to the WHO,” Liberty Counsel chairman Mat Staver sated.
“We must never allow President Biden to give control over American public health decisions to the corrupt WHO,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla, declared.
“The Biden Administration needs to stop pretending it’s the Senate and can make treaties on its own, declared GOP congressional candidate Jim Marter of Illinois. I don’t think American citizens want to submit to enhanced powers, emanating from unreachable, unaccountable appointees in global organizations like the WHO
“We’ve already noticed how members of the Democrat Party refer to things like climate change and gun violence as health emergencies,” said Marter. “Now, they want to empower global elites to make these assessments, when the American people didn’t elect them and for the most part, want nothing to do with them.
“We must stop surrendering the decision-making power over our lives and livelihoods, to unelected bureaucrats with massive power and no accountability,” the Republican candidate said.
The Telltale (Deleted) Phrase
Of particular concern in the proposed amendments, critics say, is that the Biden Administration deleted a critical phrase in the current text requiring the WHO to obtain verification of a pandemic from a nation “in whose territory the alleged health crisis is occurring.”
“This was an explicit deletion that effectively wipes out 194 nations’ sovereignty to decide whether or not they allow an international organization to step in,” explained Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
“Whereas as originally written, the WHO could not do anything without the permission of their member countries’ governments, thanks to the change that the Biden administration pushed, there is no limit at all on WHO’s power,” Carlson explained. “The Biden administration has made certain that unelected bureaucrats have total authority to declare and define public health emergencies.”
Below is the relevant part of the document with the proposed amendments submitted by the U.S. federal government. Note the strikeout of the clause calling for WHO to obtain verification from a nation in which WHO believes a public health crisis is at play.
Circumventing The Constitution’s Treaty Clause
Rather than publicly supporting a new pandemic treaty which is part of the Geneva summit’s agenda but which would require two-thirds of the Senate to ratify, “the Biden administration is seeking an end run around the Constitution’s Treaty Clause to push its agenda,” senior editor Daniel Horowitz wrote in The Blaze.
The administration’s strategy, he pointed out, is to use “amendments” to existing International Health Regulations to grant sweeping new powers to the WHO for which the administration would never obtain the requisite number of Senate votes.
“Every Republican running for state or local office must pledge to pass a resolution pre-emptively declaring these regulations null and void. Only something ratified by 67 senators has the force of law. Any international hocus-pocus is dead on arrival,” wrote Horowitz, who is also the editor of Conservative Review.
“This is a clear attempt to violate the Treaty Clause of the Constitution in order to unilaterally surrender American sovereignty; we will vigorously oppose any attempt to put this agreement into actual binding force in the United States,” wrote America First Legal (AFL), a legal firm headed by attorney Stephen Miller.
The firm has threatened litigation to halt the Biden Administration from “transferring U.S. sovereign healthcare freedoms to an unaccountable foreign body.”
AFL has also launched two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) investigations “into who and what is driving the Biden Administration’s obsession with relinquishing our national sovereignty to WHO,” according to a press release.
In a letter to President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Becerra, AFL has warned the Biden Administration that “if it does not first obtain appropriate congressional approval for any efforts to strengthen the WHO at the expense of domestic law, AFL will take swift legal action to protect the rights and liberties of American citizens.”
Protests Against the Treaty in the Free World
“The pandemic treaty poses an immense threat to democracy and would possibly give China, through its control over Director-General Tedros and the WHO, unprecedented power over nation-states,” wrote Former British MP Matt Ridley in The Telegraph.
Even though lacking the binding legality of a treaty, “the accord would still have substantial force of international law behind it,” said Ridley in a televised appearance. “For example, it could force governments to impose domestic lockdowns – despite the WHO’s own figures showing little correlation between lockdown severity and death rates.”
125,000 people in Britain have just called for a referendum on this treaty, which according to British law, requires the issue to be debated in Parliament.
Dr. Tess Lawrie, a widely acclaimed British physician, meta-analyst and former consultant with WHO singled out language in the Biden-backed amendments that called for “equitable access to vaccines and a mechanism to hold violators accountable.”
What this means, she said, is “if a nation concludes a vaccine is not safe – as has happened in this last pandemic – the WHO would have the power to override that and jab their population anyway.”
Another provision she called attention to mandates that “Vaccines should be developed within 100 days.
“This is absurd,” Dr. Lawrie said. “Safe drugs take ten years to be adequately tested and declared safe. There are more than 3.5 million people on the WHO database who have been harmed by Covid vaccines and this may be the tip of the iceberg.”
In Australia, the United Australia Party ran full-page print ads last week, claiming the major parties “were planning to transfer power over all our health infrastructure and hospitals to the Chinese-controlled WHO.”
Australian Senator Alex Antic protested that “WHO was preparing a pandemic treaty [that]would allow it to impose lockdowns and enforce treatments against the will of the Australian people.
These protests were echoed in Canada by conservative leadership candidate Leslyn Lewis who outlined the dangers of an international pandemic treaty incorporating the Biden amendments. “Canadians’ travel, medication and treatment choices could be restricted, the constitution could be suspended and it could pave the way for a global government,” Lewis said.
Censorship Committee
“Of all the proposals in the Biden amendments, the most immediately alarming,” wrote Michael Senger, author of China’s Global Lockdown Propaganda Campaign, “is the language that calls for strengthening “capacities for information management… in order to build public trust in scientific evidence and public health measures, and to counter inaccurate information and unsubstantiated rumors (italics added).”
The treaty further demands “national and global coordinated actions to address the misinformation, disinformation and stigmatization that undermine public health.”
In other words, “public health” is the pretext used to set up censorship and surveillance operations in member nations that will silence and punish dissenting views and criticism.
“Granting these new Amendments of unrestricted powers to someone like Tedros, a former member of Ethiopia’s Marxist-Leninist Party, will open the door to human rights violations in our USA and in Western democracies,” an article in Desert Review predicted.
The author, Justus Hope, quoted WHO’s Director-General Tedros saying in 2020 that “People in countries with stay-at-home orders are understandably frustrated with being confined to their homes for weeks on end, but the world will not and cannot go back to the way things were. There must be a new normal.”
Compare these words with those of Joe Biden on March 21, 2022—they eerily sound as if lifted from the same playbook: “And now is a time when things are shifting,” Biden said. “We’re going to — there’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it. And we’ve got to unite the rest of the free world in doing it.”
Language of Distortion
In an honest world with no dark agendas, an International Pandemic Treaty that would focus on global preparedness and treatments for a future pandemic would sound like a wonderful idea. What can possibly be wrong with international cooperation during a time of crisis?
But in a world of inverted language and double talk, not to mention brazen lying, words no longer mean what they are supposed to mean.
In the same way Anthony Fauci recently equated himself with “science,” corporate leaders equate whatever they want to promote with “public health.” The word when used by the advocates of a more powerful WHO does not mean actual health but rather the promotion of any product or actions favored by global elites and bureaucrats.
Anyone who criticizes their plan is accused of undermining public health—even causing people to die, they say. Such a person is maligned as a “domestic terrorist,” an enemy of the people who must be silenced.
In such a world where language is distorted, “international cooperation” as espoused by the WHO might mean that all countries are expected to do the same harmful things, destroying the world economy and society’s fabric, causing needless human death and suffering—all to clear the way for a “new normal.”
The Biden amendments are apparently aimed at facilitating that new order.
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The Biden Administration’s Game Plan
In one of his very first acts as president, Joe Biden brought the United States back into the World Health Organization. President Trump had pulled out due to significant Chinese influence within the WHO and their failure to contain the virus.
Trump chose to divert funding other global initiatives. But Biden reversed Trump’s move and also appointed Dr. Anthony Fauci head of NIAID, to represent the United States on the WHO’s executive committee.
“Why would Biden be so anxious for the United States to rejoin WHO?” wondered Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “It’s an organization that every informed person laughs at. There aren’t many international bodies that are more thoroughly discredited than WHO, particularly after Covid.
“Since the very first cases of the coronavirus were reported in Wuhan, the WHO ran interference for the Chinese government,” Carlson noted. “First, WHO claimed there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission of the virus. Remember this? The WHO cited Chinese officials who were obviously lying.
“Then, when it became clear the virus probably came out of a Chinese government lab, WHO sabotaged the investigation into the origin of the virus by appointing a gain-of-function researcher to lead the investigative team. Of course they found no evidence of a lab leak! But WHO continued to praise China’s response to Covid as “transparent,” which is the one thing it’s not.
More than a year after Biden rejoined WHO, it’s clear what the game plan was, Carlton said. It’s all about handing the World Health Organization power over every aspect of your life. “So, you may be thinking, ‘Well, it’s just about Covid and I went along with mandatory vaccines and vaccine passports at the time. How bad could it be?’”
“But the point is, it’s not just about Covid,” the Fox News host said. It’s about control. “WHO will be in charge of the digitalization of all health forms. They will also share real time information about travel restrictions. You’re going to find out exactly when you’re allowed to get on a bus or train or airplane…How about taking a ride on your bike? Will they regulate that, too?
WHO’s long-running quest for expanding power was obvious from a UN report from May 2021 that called for more powers for the World Health Organization. “To move on with the treaty, WHO needs to be empowered — financially and politically. The treaty should possess an incentive regime, [including] sanctions such as public reprimands, economic sanctions or denial of benefits,” the UN report said.
The Biden-backed amendments would provide the enforcement power the WHO currently lacks.
“So, imagine the civil liberties abuses that you lived through during the Covid lockdowns, but permanent and administered from a foreign country,” Carlson said.
“Here’s what’s at stake, not just your health, but the way you live and your relationship to the government. Representative government requires your consent. You alone have the right to choose your representatives, your style of government, the laws under which you live. That is called democracy, and this [proposed treaty] eliminates it.”
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NY Dept. of Health Proposals Set Dangerous Precedent
A new model of governance that runs counter to the civil liberties we take almost for granted is not hard to envision, as it already hovers on the horizon in states such as New York. Governor Kathy Hochul is pushing hard for regulations to create quarantine centers where citizens can be detained on the governor’s orders for being a “threat to public health.”
Below is the language of her proposed regulations, titled Investigation of Communicable Disease: Isolation and Quarantine:
On page 4:
(1) “Congregate quarantine” shall mean quarantine at a location operated or contracted by the State or local health authority, consistent with any direction that the State Commissioner of Health may issue, where multiple persons are quarantined;
On page 8:
(4) For the purposes of quarantine orders, quarantine locations may include home quarantine, other residential or temporary housing quarantine, or quarantine at such other locations as the public health authority issuing the order deems appropriate, consistent with any direction that the State Commissioner of Health may issue.
NY Department of Health officials and “fact checkers” have rushed to challenge critics of this legislation who say it sets a dangerous precedent; that it conjures up the “quarantine camps” set up in parts of Germany, Austria and Australia for “quarantine violators.”
The individuals detained in these camps are in some cases perfectly healthy people whose only wrongdoing was they were presumed to have been exposed to someone with Covid, but failed to quarantine themselves.
“Of course Gov. Hockul’s proposed legislation does not call for ‘Covid camps’ like in those countries,” DOH officials scoff.
But none of the governor’s supporters have been able to explain why the words of her proposed regulation that call for “quarantine housing, at any locations the public health authority deems appropriate,” don’t mean what they say.
This is not to suggest Gov. Hochul intends to employ brutal crackdowns like those happening today in Shanghai, Beijing and hundreds of cities in China, where CCP officials in hazmat suits break down doors to drag citizens to quarantine centers, and beat and arrest anyone breaking lockdown orders by going outside to search for food.
But if the governor’s proposals become law, New Yorkers might one day be in for a rude surprise.
