With Only Weeks Away, Experts Urgently Warn WHO Pandemic Treaty Will Usurp US Sovereignty

With Only Weeks Away, Experts Urgently Warn WHO Pandemic Treaty Will Usurp US Sovereignty

Harbinger's Daily

Americans stand just weeks away from handing over massive amounts of taxpayer funding, protective equipment intended for U.S. citizens, and an incalculable amount of influence over U.S. policy to the World Health Organization (WHO), critics warn.

The global governance body will resume meetings to revise the WHO Pandemic Agreement on Monday. 

The Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB), established to draw up the text of the agreement in December 2021, will hold its ninth meeting from April 29 to May 10. That provides just over two weeks before the 77th World Health Assembly meets from May 27 to June 1 in Geneva, Switzerland, to ratify the final document.

The most recently updated version of the “Proposal for the WHO Pandemic Agreement,” amended on April 22, would redistribute wealth and protective equipment away from the U.S., establish a global governing board with little accountability to U.S. citizens and, critics say, water down U.S. sovereignty over how it responds to future pandemics.

The latest version of the agreement calls on nations to adopt “whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches” to pandemics, “including the private sector and civil society.” Governments should carry out so-called education programs that will suppress competing narratives about the pandemic, as the U.S. government did during COVID-19. Nations must also conduct research to determine what forces “hinder or strengthen adherence to public health and social measures in a pandemic,” such as mask and vaccine mandates.

WHO makes clear it intends to involve itself far beyond the physical aspects of the outbreak. The latest agreement invokes the “public health impact of growing threats such as climate change, poverty and hunger.” Fighting pandemics, it states, requires nations to “achieve greater health equity” by taking “resolute action on the social, environmental, cultural, political and economic determinants of health.”

This includes adopting a controversial “OneHealth” approach, which attempts to “balance” the “health of people, animals and ecosystems” as though all were equally valuable.

Nations have the right to “adopt legislation” only “in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, the WHO Constitution and the principles of international law, and their sovereign rights over their biological resources.” They also may not make reservations that are “incompatible with the object and purpose of the WHO Pandemic Agreement,” as determined by the WHO.

Aside from incursions onto national prerogatives spelled out in the WHO Pandemic Agreement, the document establishes a “Conference of the Parties,” a group of unelected officials empowered to adopt new resolutions that will be legally binding upon signatories.

The text makes the WHO pandemic arrangement easy to get into but hard to leave. Once a nation signs onto the accord, it “shall not be discharged” from any “obligations which accrued while it was a Party to the WHO Pandemic Agreement,” even after it withdraws.

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