by Will Jones, Daily Sceptic:
The World Health Organisation is gearing up to persuade the world’s governments to sign a new pandemic treaty in May that would allow the unelected body to seize power over nation states in future pandemics, warns Matt Ridley in the Mail. Here’s an excerpt.
Though called an ‘accord’ so as not to frighten democrats who still like that old-fashioned thing called accountability, it is a significant power grab by an unelected body that seems determined now to set down rules for how countries should react to future pandemics. Never waste a good crisis, as the saying goes.
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Yet the WHO has a terrible track record in managing epidemics, not least in its response to COVID-19, where it made a series of bad mistakes and did China’s bidding. The Pandemic Accord would be a reward for failure.
Last month Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s Director-General, tweeted plaintively: “There’s a litany of lies and conspiracy theories about the #PandemicAccord.
“Let me tell you what the accord is about — it’s a set of commitments by countries to strengthen the world’s defences in several areas: prevention with a One Health approach; health and care workforce; research and development; access to vaccines, treatments and tests; sharing of information, technology and biological samples. What is so problematic about those commitments?”
This sounds lovely. But buried within the proposed treaty, and a parallel set of recommended changes to the International Health Regulations, is a grant to the WHO of power to instruct governments on how to manage societies during a pandemic, vesting that power in the Director-General.
These undertakings would be “legally binding” as the G20 leaders stated in Bali in 2022 and New Delhi in 2023.
The suggested amendment leaves little doubt as to who would be in charge: “States… recognise WHO as the guidance and coordinating authority of international public health response during public health Emergency of International Concern and undertake to follow WHO’s recommendations in their international public health response.”
What would this mean for the Swedish Government, which decided against fully locking down society and closing schools, avoiding the devastating economic consequences of lockdown without suffering worse excess deaths than other countries? Could it do so next time?
The accord would oblige countries to greatly increase funding of the WHO in the event of a pandemic, to pay for the “containment of spill-over at source” and to hand over products such as vaccines “in accordance with timetables to be agreed between the WHO and manufacturers”. Would Britain under such strictures be permitted to roll out its vaccine programme with the remarkable efficiency it did from 2021 onwards?
Countries would also agree to limit criticism of the WHO in order to “combat false, misleading, misinformation or disinformation”. This very article could in theory be censored by our government at the behest of the WHO.
The recent track record of the body to which our Government is about to hand such powers and funds does not inspire confidence.
