Months of negotiations over the final language of a revised global Pandemic Treaty, being pushed by the World Health Organization as a means of combating future pandemics, ended last week without an agreed-upon draft.
Opponents of the treaty, originally crafted in 2021, that would concentrate enormous power in the hands of the World Health Organization, welcomed the breakdown of talks.
They see the revised treaty as a dangerous vehicle that would subordinate the United States and other democracies to a world body allegedly controlled by China, and would curtail civil liberties under the guise of safeguarding public health.
Negotiators have spent more than two years working on revisions to the international treaty to address an unknown future pathogen, labeled in the document as “Disease X.”
The WHO’s plan was to win acceptance of the final draft by a majority of the world body’s 194 participating countries, at a World Health Assembly vote on May 27. The treaty would then be legally binding on all members.
Despite not meeting last Friday’s deadline, WHO’s Director-General Tedros said the negotiators will continue the talks in coming weeks until the treaty is hammered out.
“A failure to deliver the pandemic agreement and the International Health Regulations amendments will be a missed opportunity for which future generations may not forgive us,” he said.
In the meantime, opposition to the accord has been mounting since a WHO conference in Geneva two years ago in May 2022.
Government officials as well as experts in public health, U.S. constitutional law and international regulatory affairs along with rank and file Americans, have decried the treaty’s flaws, beginning with the notion of further empowering an organization that demonstrated colossal failure during the recent pandemic.
Epic Failures
“Throughout the Covid-19 Pandemic, the WHO caved to the Chinese Communist Party,” said Rep. Brad Wenstrup R-OH, Chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on the Pandemic, at a press conference organized by Rep. Chris Smith, R-NJ.
“They didn’t lead by following the science, they chose to cover up for China. Now they want to infringe upon our national sovereignty with their proposed pandemic treaty?” Wenstrup asked incredulously.
Brett Schaeffer of the Heritage Foundation mirrored this concern, criticizing the treaty’s failure to address China’s refusal to cooperate with international efforts to nail down the virus’s origins.
“At a minimum, one would expect any new pandemic treaty to review what went wrong during Covid-19 in order to prevent future repetition,” Schaefer stated. “The current draft does no such thing.”
Instead, he pointed out, “the draft agreement focuses on curtailing speech, mandating resource transfers (requiring member countries to supply WHO with vaccines and drugs), weakening intellectual property rights, mandating technology sharing, and most of all, empowering the WHO.”
“Far too little scrutiny has been given, far too few questions asked as to what this legally binding treaty means to health policy in the United States and elsewhere,” said Rep. Chris Smith, senior member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, who led the press conference.
He slammed the treaty for providing massive and “morally reprehensible” funding for the killing of human embryos in the womb as “an essential human service.”
“The term sounds perfectly benign, what could be wrong with it?” Sen. Smith said in an appearance on Washington Watch. “Well, go into WHO’s website where they define ‘essential human service.’ They actually embedded language saying it means supporting abortion on demand. There is absolutely no ambiguity here,” Smith emphasized.
“This is in a section on combatting infectious diseases,” he noted in disgust. “As if an unborn child is the equivalent of an infectious disease that has to be excised.”
Stamping Out Dissent
Smith also drew attention to Article 18 of the treaty that seeks to “combat false, misleading misinformation.” This is an attempt to curb free speech under the guise that disagreeing with the official narrative can hamper efforts “to help humanity,” he remarked.
“Will there be any room for dissent on vaccines, therapeutics, virus transmission and the like—especially among scientists and health professionals—or will group think again crowd out other viewpoints?” the congressman asked. “We have reason for concern.”
Critics noted the irony that since the earliest days of the pandemic, WHO’s president Tedros himself has been spreading misinformation, as he repeatedly endorsed the Chinese Communist Party’s slow and secretive response to the Covid-19 pandemic, helping it conceal the origins of the outbreak.
Tedros also parroted Beijing’s false messaging that the virus did not cause human-to-human transmission, a lie that delayed world efforts to contain the spread and indirectly caused countless deaths.
In another serious lapse of responsibility, “the WHO did not declare a pandemic until March 11 2020, weeks after the official criteria for a pandemic had been met,” writes the Spectator. It denied that the virus was airborne despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and sharply flip-flopped over masking mandates.
Addressing articles in the draft that provide mechanisms for combatting “misinformation” and dissent, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy said, “Down this road leads a global governance arrangement that is designed to crush—not restrict, not suppress—crush the sovereignty of the United States.”
“This treaty is a global power grab using any future so-called emergency as a justification to use that power,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, who also addressed the press briefing. “At risk is national sovereignty…the term ‘shall’ appears over 175 times in the draft document. In legal parlance, ‘shall’ is mandatory. This is anything but a voluntary agreement.”
Britain Rejects Treaty’s Lynchpin
Great Britain announced unequivocally last week, even before treaty talks fell apart, that it would never agree to a key lynchpin of the agreement—the obligation to turn over a fifth of its pandemic vaccines and drugs to the WHO, instead of stockpiling its resources for the benefit of its own citizens.
“That would in effect be signing over its autonomy,” reported The Telegraph, quoting a source familiar with the negotiations, “which the government will never do.”
The provision that would compel each country to contribute twenty per cent of its healthcare items to WHO’s storehouses is seen as a red line by many nations involved in the treaty discussions, the article said.
Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey also expressed his concern about the “billions of dollars U.S. taxpayers will be required to give, pursuant to Article 20 of the Agreement, in ‘annual monetary contributions … to the WHO Pandemic Agreement.’ He noted that the treaty in effect requires the United States to give the WHO a blank check for amounts only to be determined down the road, after the treaty has been ratified.
Another measure that drew opposition from some of the negotiators, Smith said, was the treaty’s rigidity in not allowing them to give partial consent to a given Article, along with their “reservations” or recommendations regarding language in the text. The choices they were given were to vote for either “all or nothing.” Many chose the latter.
Can a Treaty Be Ratified Without the Senate?
If the treaty is approved by the majority of the delegates of the 194 member countries, say policy analysts, 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.
The world body will have the right, backed by international law, to mandate 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.
Of paramount importance is whether the Biden administration will submit the treaty to the U.S. Senate “for its constitutionally-required advice and consent,” Rep. Smith noted, warning that “an executive agreement bypassing Senate ratification would be an egregious mistake.”
Technically, for a treaty to be enacted in the United States, it must win a two-thirds majority in the Senate. Since a well-publicized debate might turn the public against the treaty, the White House, with backup from the State Department, may seek to bypass that step, observers say.
One way to stop this end run around the Senate, treaty opponents suggest, is by forcing a debate in the Senate, which Sen. Paul Rand, R-KY, has declared he will do.
White House Mobilized Support for Pandemic Treaty
Today’s heated controversy over the pandemic treaty grew out of a conference in Geneva two years ago, when WHO’s participating nations gathered to discuss amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) that form the core of the treaty.
These amendments were offered by the Biden administration 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 the Geneva summit.
Until April 12, 2022, shortly before the conference opened in Geneva, the contents of the amendments were held under wraps. Once they became public, the administration’s bid to significantly expand WHO’s power through the amendments triggered an uproar from GOP leaders and a host of critics in other democratic nations.
GOP leaders were 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.
Under the treaty’s provisions, as mentioned above, Director-General Tedros or someone else occupying WHO’s top post would be legally entitled to impose public health mandates on the American people for any “health emergency” he chose to identify.
In addition, under the amendments, WHO would 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 WHO body’s mandates would be subject to fines and sanctions.
“We must never allow President Biden to give control over American public health decisions to the corrupt WHO,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla, declared at the time of the Geneva conference.
The Treaty’s Left-Wing Agenda
A closer look at the current treaty text reveals its socialist and left-wing agenda. For example, “climate change” is folded into public health under the rationale that the dire environmental “threats” we supposedly face require elevating “ecological health” into a key component of public health.
Strikingly, animal and “ecological” health are cast as equal in importance to human health (neatly packaged as “One Health),” and appears as a key theme throughout the text.
The “one health” concept was launched in 2004, at a globalist conference sponsored by the Rockefeller Center, titled “One World, One Health.” At this event, the idea was put forward that public health needed to be expanded into an umbrella which could control all aspects of life, including “invasive alien species”—in the bizarre wording of the Center’s report on the conference.
In a similar vein, today’s pandemic treaty proposes a transfer of sweeping decision-making power to the WHO regarding basic societal functions, as long as these can be cast as matters of public health or “hazards to public health.”
Thus, a broad range of real or perceived societal problems such as poverty, pollution, climate change, overpopulation, environmental safety and any factor that can be reinvented as a catalyst for illness, would, under the treaty, be subject to the WHO’s jurisdiction.
Most ominously, the WHO director general would have sole authority to decide when and where its emergency health powers should be invoked.
“We’ve already noticed how members of the Democrat Party refer to things like climate change and gun violence as health emergencies,” said Republican candidate Marter. “Now, they want to empower global elites to make these assessments and impose control, when the American people didn’t elect them and for the most part, want nothing to do with them.”
Trump Pulled out of WHO; Biden Re-joined
In one of his very first acts as president, Joe Biden brought the United States back into the WHO. President Trump had pulled out due to excessive Chinese influence within the organization and its poor track record during the pandemic.
“Why would Biden be so anxious for the United States to rejoin WHO?” wondered former Fox News host Tucker Carlson at the time. “There aren’t many international bodies that are more thoroughly discredited than WHO.
“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. 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.”
By now it’s clear what the game plan was, Carlton said. “It’s all about handing the WHO power. 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…”
A careful read of the newest draft text of the pandemic treaty confirms Carlson’s critique. It continually emphasizes the need for more surveillance and centralized control of public “health.” This will undoubtedly fuel the push to have digital IDs such as digital passports to track the global population.
With digital passports, one’s entire range of daily activities can be monitored and controlled, with compliance rewarded and dissent instantly penalized.
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Pandemic Treaty Draws Fire for Usurping Nations’ Sovereignty
“The bureaucrats who think they run the world are at it again!” an op-ed in The Telegraph about the international pandemic treaty began. “They are trying to convince our national leaders to sign away our sovereignty, except this time it may seriously damage your health.”
The article went on to caution readers that the treaty in its present form will morph into a very watered-down document down the road, as global masters engage in secret back door negotiations to amass “more money and power to build their global public health empire.”
“This is exactly how the WHO has operated in the past, and it’s exactly why I do not trust the people who run it today,” the author wrote. He castigated the WHO as “a failing, expensive, unelected, unaccountable, supra-national body that wants more and more powers to run roughshod over state democracies and free citizens.”
“Many have paid the price for the WHO’s failings,” the op-ed noted. “Millions died around the world after WHO Director-General Tedros told the world in January 2020 that there was no human-to-human transmission of Covid-19.”
The article petitioned politicians to “hold those responsible for the WHO’s failings during Covid to account.”
The author also criticized the WHO for “giving itself a new budget of almost $7 billion during a cost-of-living crisis, with taxpayers in the US, UK and EU bankrolling over half of it.” He called on countries to cut their contributions to the world body by half, and in turn force the WHO to cut its spending by fifty per cent.
“Let’s take back control of all areas of health policies that impact citizens’ rights and freedoms,” the writer urged. He called on British citizens to deny support for “one-size-fits-all treaties that put pressure on governments to control people or tell them how to live their lives.”
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Fear-Mongering Tactics Have Lost their Bite
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 doublespeak, not to mention outright lying, words no longer mean what they are supposed to mean. Corporate leaders and global elites simply equate whatever they seek to promote with “public health.”
Take the subject of climate change; it has become an article of faith on the left that climate change is a major threat to mankind, with many pushing the theory that climate change and “human encroachment on nature” are inherently linked with the danger of pandemics.
This is indeed a stretch, yet the pandemic treaty seeks to weave these issues together by arguing that climate change is somehow connected with human encroachment on nature, which in turn causes “wildlife habitat loss.”
The cycle continues with wildlife habitat loss supposedly endangering people by bringing them into closer contact with wild animals, thus exposing them to infectious diseases. Those diseases can jump from animals to the human population and then go on to potentially wipe out humanity, the theory goes.
Fear of a pandemic that might break out any day and lay waste to mankind is thus used to justify invasive surveillance of every aspect of our lives and to drum up a lot of money to “fix” the problem.
The fear-mongering tactics that kept the world compliant during the pandemic, however, have lost much of their bite. In addition, some experts have dared to note that while wildlife habitat loss is a real ecological issue, there is very little evidence tying it to pandemics.
Despite the fact that many large organizations, medical societies and prestigious journals have lined up behind the pandemic treaty, a wave of grass roots opposition is making its voice heard on social media, talk shows, on podcasts and in op-eds, in efforts to derail the accord.
The treaty can still be resuscitated and likely will in some form, experts predict. But it will be a watered down document, very different from the one that failed last week to achieve a consensus.
