Yesterday in Westminster Hall, MPs debated the Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response: International Agreement. Over 150,000 signed the petition to “not sign any WHO Pandemic Treaty unless it is approved via public referendum”. They don’t want the Government to commit to signing an international treaty unless it is approved through a public referendum.
Steve Brine MP said he was “puzzled by the debate”. We are too.
So, what is the Treaty about, and should we be concerned?
The WHO wants member states to negotiate a new international instrument to advance collective action for pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.
In March 2021, world leaders, including Boris Johnson, announced the need for a treaty to enhance international pandemic cooperation. In October, a WHO working group published a ‘zero draft’ report for consideration by the World Health Assembly (WHA), the WHO’s decision-making body. As a result, the WHA convened a second special session in December, where it established an Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) to draft and negotiate the instrument with a view to its adoption under Article 19 of the WHO Constitution. Article 19 of the WHO’S Constitution gives the WHA the authority to adopt conventions or agreements on any matter within WHO’s competence.
Does the U.K. support the treaty? Well, Boris Johnson, as Prime Minister, was a signatory. In May 2022, the Government responded to the petition, stating it supported “a new legally-binding instrument.”
Government support that is pledged despite not knowing the substance of what is being proposed: the Government supports a new treaty “as part of a cooperative and comprehensive approach to pandemic prevention, preparedness and response”.
The zero draft for consideration was reported at the fourth INB meeting – known as the WHO CA+. The aim of the CA+ is “a world where pandemics are effectively controlled”. Have we learnt anything about respiratory agents?
One of the aims of the CA+ is confusing: it states it wants to “achieve universal health coverage”. But, the concept of universal health coverage is based on the 1948 WHO Constitution, which declares health a fundamental human right and commits to ensuring the highest attainable level of health for all – therefore, why should universal coverage be reserved for pandemics?
One of the primary reasons underpinning the treaty is the “recognition of the catastrophic failure of the international community to show solidarity and equity in response to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic”. There’s no need then for vital reflection on how we got it so wrong – it’s not just more of the same; this treaty sets out it will be much more.
Currently, the negotiating team is looking into the definition, means and procedure for declaring a pandemic, what this means in practice, how to finance pandemic preparedness and response initiatives and the setting up of a new Governing Body for overseeing the treaty.
It’s not all bad news: manufacturers are well catered for. Article 7(3a) states:
During inter-pandemic times all parties will coordinate, collaborate, facilitate and incentivise manufacturers of pandemic-related products to transfer relevant technology and know-how to capable manufacturer(s) (as defined below) on mutually agreed terms, including through technology transfer hubs and product development partnerships, and to address the needs to develop new pandemic-related products in a short time frame.
The petition asks for a referendum to decide whether the treaty will proceed. This isn’t going to happen – once the political will is in place, there’s little to stop the progress unless a block of countries at the WHA objects.
The issues that concern us are the definition, the costs and the actors.
We have previously noted the problems with defining a pandemic, and issues with the elusive definition of pandemic influenza have been pointed out as far back as 2011 when the need for any impact on morbidity and mortality was removed. Instead, all you needed was the worldwide spread of a new disease “against which the population has no immunity”.
There are also no widely accepted definitions for the end of the pandemic – who knows when this one will end?
As for the costs: Article 19(1c) of the draft report states:
Commit to prioritise and increase or maintain, including through greater collaboration between the health, finance and private sectors, as appropriate, domestic funding by allocating in its annual budgets not lower than 5% of its current health expenditure to pandemic prevention, preparedness, response and health systems recovery, notably for improving and sustaining relevant capacities and working to achieve universal health coverage. (emphasis added)
Has anyone considered the cost? Five per cent is roughly £7.5 billion for England and Wales – about half the General Practice budget gone. Any answers on what the XX% of GDP referred to below might add up to are much appreciated.
Commit to allocate, in accordance with its respective capacities, XX% of its gross domestic product for international cooperation and assistance on pandemic prevention, preparedness, response and health systems recovery, particularly for developing countries, including through international organisations and existing and new mechanisms.
As for the actors in all this, there will be many. Global politics is an excellent distractor for domestic problems; the WHO Global Pandemic Supply Chain and Logistics Network will ensure numerous opportunities for industry, and academia will gladly go along with an agenda that promises $XXX funding opportunities. At the centre will be the WHO – primarily a political organisation; it is essential that the past mistakes of the influenza narrative are not repeated.
In 2010, key scientists advising the WHO on pandemic planning had done paid work for industry that stood to gain from the guidance they authored. Deborah Cohen’s investigation showed that key experts contributing to the plan were conflicted. As a result, the definition of a pandemic was altered, billions of pounds of antivirals were stockpiled, and the WHO’s warning of two billion influenza H1N1 cases never materialised.
There’s been a lot (rightly) made about this treaty ceding power to an unelected body.
The treaty will be a legally binding instrument. There may be some downplaying of this when folk realise the implications. However, if a party wants to leave, it can do so at any time within two years from the date the WHO CA+ entered into force. But we will have to give one year’s notice (it’s unclear what happens after two years).
And as if you don’t need to be any more concerned, any party may propose amendments to the WHO CA+ that can be adopted by a two-thirds majority vote of the Parties present and voting at the session.
The INB will submit the treaty for consideration by the 77th World Health Assembly in May 2024. As Esther McVey said, we need “robust debate and an open review” of the plans.
Once the treaty is in force – to make it relevant and the political effort worthwhile – all you’ll need is another pandemic.
We do not need to spell out the catastrophic failures of the last three years. For now, just think that the same people are in charge and as our series on the UKHSA ‘evidence base’ for mask mandates shows, they do not care what any of us think.
This is not a U.K. problem, and we urge our non-U.K. readers to spread the word and, if they agree, our grave concerns.
We’ll be watching; we’ll keep you posted and keep writing. Somebody somewhere will take notice, perhaps.
Dr. Carl Heneghan is the Oxford Professor of Evidence Based Medicine and Dr. Tom Jefferson is an epidemiologist based in Rome who works with Professor Heneghan on the Cochrane Collaboration. This article was first published on their Substack blog, Trust The Evidence, which you can subscribe to here.
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I signed the petition and read the WHO proposals – an org largely funded by the US Deep State and Kill Gates. It does impinge on national freedom. Quite a lot.
There is no need whatsoever for any UN-WHO-EU or transnational actor to interfere on health, the economy, ecological issues, our own borders and laws. None.
Rona was a scamdemic and the fact that these Medical Narzees are pushing so hard on the back of that for unfettered WHO and UN powers is simply astounding. More puzzling is why any sentient person or MP is remotely interested in giving up our sovereignty on ‘health’ for fake scamdemics based on ‘tests’ and ‘cases’ or whatever they choose to use, to a Marxist Terrorist like Tedros or a Gates-funded group of losers like the WHO.
“sentient person or MP” …LOL. Sadly true – with only one or two notable exceptions.
Well this is very fitting…Has anyone seen this excellent short ( 24mins ) animated film, ‘Beyond The Reset’? I say ”excellent” but the makers have done a great job of illustrating the bleak, miserable, dystopian future that lies in store for us if insufficient zombie plebs don’t wake the fk up and oppose this thing. I could use the word ”exaggerated” but I think all bets are off and all things are possible if this WHO thing goes through. Anyway, I enjoyed this.
*And check out the emergency alerts on the mobile phones. Now how does one delete it from a Samsung Galaxy??
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWkepoLUZfs&ab_channel=3DEpixInc.
Go to Settings/ Disable Emergency Alerts?
iPhone. Settings / Notifications. Scroll right down to the bottom to find Emergency Alerts. Disable Extreme alerts and Severe alerts.
The ‘UK’ Government responded to the petition with disdain and actually uses WHO wording to justify this treaty. Consider the following:
“To protect lives, the economy and future generations from future pandemics, the UK government supports a new legally-binding instrument to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.”
It goes on:
“COVID-19 has demonstrated that no-one is safe until we are all safe, and that effective global cooperation is needed to better protect the UK and other countries around the world from the detrimental health, social and economic impacts of pandemics and other health threats.”
The overtly Marxist ‘no one is safe until we are all safe’ was expressed by all the world government organisations right at the beginning of this coup, and it is a coup. Here is it’s origin:
“Without equitable access to #COVID19 vaccines – something that #COVAX is built to ensure – the pandemic will continue to rage. After all, in a highly interconnected world, no one is safe unless everyone is safe”
Anaradha Gupta Gavi. Deputy Chief Executive Officer of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance
Then parroted by the following:
UNHCR (UN Refugee Agency): “Statement: No-one is safe until everyone is safe – why we need a global response to COVID-19”
WHO: “No one is safe from COVID-19 until everyone is safe.”
UN: “No one is safe, until everyone is”
USGLC: “FACT SHEET: No One Is Safe Until Everyone Is Safe”
ourworldindata: “No one is safe, until everyone is”
And…
FT/Euro News/Education International/ ‘No one is safe until everyone is safe’
I talk to people who still have no idea of what is coming and they also don’t seem to care. I found this quote right at the beginning of all this but I doubt whether many of our leaders would understand it’s significance, or they do and don’t care.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals” –
C. S. Lewis
“to be classed with … domestic animals” –
Indeed.
I hadn’t quite noticed but there is something else more chilling about the wording of the UK Governments response to the petition. It isn’t the UK Government’s words, but those of the WHO. This means that the UK Government has already fallen and the ‘enemy’ is inside the walls.
I love that last bit from the CS Lewis quote. Too many people in our country can be “classed with infants, imbeciles and domestic animals” When it relates to things like this WHO treaty. They include many people who show no interest in this, or are lacking sufficient intelligence to understand its implications. They include most of our politicians and in particular Boris Johnson, who has already promoted it. Are they really going to sign up to this abominable removal of our government’s right to decide how we deal with health issues in our country?
Yes, they are.
One huge problem if this goes through as intended will be that every country and presumably everyone in said countries – will be subject to the same medical diktats.
Thus there will be no control group or country available to measure
efficacy/harms/benefits of the, for the good of everyone lol, dictated “pandemic products” against.
This will be the end of evidence based medicine. Imagine where we’d be without the likes of Sweden and Florida now.
So, genius at its finest yet again.
A leaf purely out of bigpharma’s huge playbook. Think vaccine aka gene therapy trials – or better still, read “Turtles All The Way Down” for an insight into the machinations of bigpharma. .
Interesting to see what Sweden and Japan will do. They were protected by their Constitutions to an extent.
Once this is implemented and the WHO announces another Scamdemic the killing will begin.
Massive depopulation is the aim. This is World War.
Looks like I’m headed for the camps. At least they won’t get me with the toxic stabs. No wait they’ll forcible inject everyone.
There are more of us than them….
It strikes me that nation states are even discussing this, first and foremost Sweden and a Brexiter governed UK.
The US and Germany as main funders and subscribers to leftie collectivism are no surprise in that regard.
They are totally behind it and/as they are firmly in the grip of Big Pharma, as the formerly most powerful auto industry is now deliberately being destroyed and a replacement had to be and was found.
Sahin’s outlet is now responsible for 1% of German GDP, much more on a profit base, and his Co-owners, the Strüngmann brothers, are probably the most powerful Strippenzieher in Germany these days.
Add in Bayer, Boehringer&co and you get the picture.
The loss of sovereignty through this is officially bigger, more arbitrary and more dictatorial than that of German parliamentarians to the Nazis through their passing of the enabling act of 1933, possibly another reason why Germany is so keen on it.
And at that stage, the Nazis hadn’t failed yet totally, unlike the WHO.
But that real reason and the stage of delusion of British MPs was also clearly at display yesterday, when the desperate ‘vaccine’ shills interrupted with their world-beating ‘questions’.
” …the 1948 WHO Constitution, which declares health a fundamental human right and commits to ensuring the highest attainable level of health for all.”
And that has been broadly achieved and not through ‘compassionate’ emoting and charity, but through countries getting wealthier through modern industry and trade driven by individuals. The countries with then longest life expectancies are the wealthiest. This is the problem for many NGOs, in the main they are not needed.
“It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader. Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing ‘compassion’ for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.”
Thomas Sowell
That’s a cracker from Sowell.
Indeed. And here is another in the same vane by Buckminster Fuller writing in the 1960s:
“Take away the energy-distributing networks and the industrial machinery from America, Russia, and all the world’s industrialized countries, and within six months more than two billion swiftly and painfully deteriorating people will starve to death. Take away all the world’s politicians, all the ideologies and their professional protagonists from those same countries, and send them off on a rocket trip around the sun and leave all the countries their present energy networks, industrial machinery, routine production and distribution personnel, and no more humans will starve nor be afflicted in health than at present.
Fortunately, the do-more-with-less invention initiative does not derive from political debate, bureaucratic licensing, or private economic patronage. The license comes only from the blue sky of the inventor’s intellect. No one licensed the inventors of the airplane, telephone, electric light, and radio to go to work. It took only the personally dedicated initiative of five men to invent those world transforming and world shrinking developments. Herein lies the unexpectedly swift effectiveness of the design-science revolution. Despite this historical demonstrable fact, world society as yet persists in looking exclusively to its politicians and their ideologues for world problem solving.“
Brilliant. I think Belgium didn’t have much of a government for a good while a few years ago, they seemed to survive.
WHO Pandemic Treaty Tyranny on Steroids
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National governments don’t “care”,because national governments aren’t running the show.
Isn’t an MP who signs away, or abets signing away, the ‘sovereign’ power of the country committing treason?
It’s obvious the definition of pandemic will be as airtight as Swiss cheese, a fake test will be created, surveillance and control measures will have criminal sanctions, safe and effective treatments will magically materialise, and that nefarious interests will control the Tedros sock-puppet
That’s why I signed it. I want the UK to make its own decisions regarding any future pandemics. The idea of WHO calling the shots is scary.
I don’t believe the government and police authorities understand what contemp they are held in. They will be ignored. No tattooed buzz cut trans policeperson is brave enough to knock MY door – not if it takes 6 to remove Golliwog dolls.
The WHO treaty is something no government should sign up to. It commits governments to follow WHO directives, by an undemocratic organisation funded and influence by big pharma and despicable organisations such as that controlled by Bill Gates. It would remove government’s rights to decide what action if any to take about health issues. Although our government got it wrong over Covid, that was in a large part due to the influence of the WHO. I listened to Andrew Bridgen’s contribution to the off-parliament debate, and although he rambled a bit he, drew attention to the issues that every one of our politicians should be voting against. Judging by the blank looks and lack of support from every one else there, it would be easy to assume our politicians are too thick to understand the dangers from this treaty if we sign up to it.
We need to ask each political party there position on the WHO.
Heneghan & Jefferson’s post is excellent, as are most comments on here (especially sskinner’s great quotations, some new to me! I will save and treasure!).
As a petition signer, I got sent the Hansard record of the Petitions Committee early this morning. I wondered whether it was worth reading – most discussion in other Petitions Committee meetings have been outrageously bad. As an example, one last year (?) on BBC Bias, where no-one wanted to criticise the BBC other than some Labour MP twerp (I’ve a feeling it was Clive Lewis MP) who moaned about how Right Wing was the BBC bias. Much of the remainder of the meeting was spent by the Committee comparing how much they were enjoying “Gentleman Jack.” Or treating those sufficiently concerned to sign the bloody petition with absolute contempt.
So it is fair to say that my expectations today were low.
But, just for once, this was (very largely) a decent discussion on the WHO and its wretched “Treaty”. The contributions of Andrew Bridgen were absolutely brilliant. Sir Christopher Chope and Ester McVey were also First Class, and very valuable points made by Danny Kruger as well. OK, the WHO & Vaccines & Lockdown enthusiasts, like the execrable buffoon John Spellar were also there, but they just made themselves look stupid, like Anne McLaughlin who of course was after another Scottish Referendum and Preet Kaur Gill who was worried that Climate Change had made matters worse and that much more GB International Aid was required.
At the end of the Committee meeting we had:-
Esther McVey
“Can the Minister reassure my constituents who are concerned that the Government will concede sovereignty and hand power to WHO? Can she give reassurances that that will not happen?”
Anne-Marie Trevelyan [Minister of State Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office for Indo-Pacific]
“Yes, absolutely I can. The speculation that somehow the instrument will undermine UK sovereignty and give WHO powers over national public health measures is simply not the case. I absolutely reassure both my right hon. Friend and my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Sally-Ann Hart), who raised a similar issue earlier, on behalf of all their constituents: that is not the case. The UK remains in control of any future domestic decisions about public health matters—such as domestic vaccination—that might be needed in any future pandemic that we may have to manage. Protecting those national sovereign rights is a distinct principle in the existing draft text. Other Members have also identified that as an important priority, so it is good to have the opportunity of this debate, brought about by those who have concerns, to restate that that is absolutely not under threat.”
OK, I interpret that as Minister Trevelyan will likely soon be spending more time with her family. But all of it is worth reading and saving as evidence!
That response from the Minister reminds me of Edward Heath’s “There will be no loss of essential sovereignty” Outright liars both.