The World Health Organization (WHO) recently requested that governments from around the globe send in their input on what should be included in a new international agreement, which is currently being drafted.
The new document is being referred to as “the pandemic treaty.” By obtaining political commitments from potential signer-nations, the WHO is evidently seeking to bolster support for the latest addition to an already sizable body of existing global law.
Concerns are being raised by organizations and informed citizens about the sovereignty of established nations, as well as the public health care systems located within their purviews.
In a simultaneous unfolding of events, another international agreement is undergoing a substantial revision. It’s called the International Health Regulations (IHR), and it has been around for more than five decades. However, the United States didn’t sign on to it until 2005.
The purported role of the IHR is to provide public health guidance to the governments of nations throughout the world.
This past January the Biden administration submitted new amendments to the IHR, which will likely be subsumed within the proposed pandemic treaty. This would result in a global governance apparatus that would be tailor-made for the WHO.
Back in December 2021something called an “intergovernmental negotiating body” was established, the purpose of which was to draft and negotiate the pandemic treaty that is currently being designed.
The WHO’s primary funder is Bill Gates. Gates is reportedly forming a pandemic response team made up of thousands of disease experts who would work with the WHO.
The United States had withdrawn from the WHO under the Trump administration, due to the organization’s failed leadership and loss of trust in parts of the world, especially with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the Biden administration rejoined the WHO and is now looking to strengthen the organization’s ability to direct health-related decisions internationally.
Despite the fact that the final text of the treaty has not yet been completed, documents from groups that are working on the international agreement indicate a significant expansion of the term “pandemic.” The WHO had already transformed the word’s definition to an “epidemic of a disease” that affects the world population, without requirements of high morbidity.
The treaty’s drafters are seeking to broaden the categorization of what would constitute a “pandemic.” If they succeed, it would allow the WHO to classify just about any potential malady as a “pandemic,” in effect granting the organization the power to direct the administration of health care responses worldwide.
Proposed amendments from the United States to the IHR would allow the director-general of the WHO to declare a public health emergency of international concern, without having to obtain agreement from the government of an affected country.
Former WHO legal consultant Silvia Behrendt, along with University College Dublin law lecturer Amrei Müller, criticized the Biden administration’s proposals.
“The proposed US amendments to Article 12 IHR will both considerably extend the executive powers of the WHO Director-General to declare global emergency-like situations and centralize this power further by removing the need to consult and find agreement with the respective state party,” the authors wrote.
The World Health Assembly (WHA) is meeting to vote on the IHR amendments, with the apparent hopes of making them an established part of international law.
The authors of the above referenced article call upon the members of the WHA to carefully consider the implications of the U.S.’s proposed amendments before endorsing and adopting them.
The following rhetorical question was posed by Behrendt and Müller:
“Have technocratic, biomedical approaches, developed and implemented from the top down primarily through executive action, worked well in response to Covid-19, justifying a further extension and centralization of global emergency powers at WHO?”
The authors also asked whether mechanisms need to be set up to ensure that the WHO complies with its “responsibilities for human rights that derive from international human rights law.”
The ultimate goal of the WHO and WHA appears to be a desire to make the proposed pandemic treaty enforceable in the United States and throughout the entire planet.
The Treaty Clause of the U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 2, spells out the process by which a treaty becomes domestic law. The primary negotiator of agreements between the United States and other nations is the president. The agreements become binding federal laws after they have been ratified by a two-thirds vote in the U.S. Senate.
Additionally, the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, Article VI, Paragraph 2, grants to ratified treaties the status of being the equivalent of duly passed statutes, i.e., the “supreme law of the land.”
The most compelling issue for the American people right now can be summed up in two questions:
Do you want an alphabet of international agencies controlling your personal health care destiny? Or do you want to control your own?
Better look both ways before crossing this street.
James Hirsen 