The WHO Pandemic Agreement has worried many, and justifiably so. Covid has taught us all to be wary of people who talk about pandemics, of people who plan for pandemics and above all of people peddling various snake oils and schemes to mitigate pandemics. The prospect of an international treaty to further encourage these evils is in itself very bad, whatever it actually provides for. Pandemics, I will never tire of repeating, are social constructs, and if you don’t want to have them, you should try thinking less about them. Seasonal respiratory viruses in fact represent a comparatively small threat to humanity; it is entirely in our reaction to them that the danger lies.
All of the wrong people have left their fingerprints on the WHO Pandemic Agreement. The idea originated in November 2020 with Charles Michel, the President of the European Council. The G7 and the World Health Organisation both threw their support behind the concept in 2021. There have now been at least seven rounds of negotiations, culminating in an awkwardly named ‘Proposal for negotiating text of the WHO Pandemic Agreement‘, published on October 30th 2023. As the title says, this is only a proposal. There will be further haggling before the final Agreement comes up for a vote in May at the World Health Assembly in Geneva. We do not yet know whether there will even be a pandemic treaty, how much of it will be legally binding, how much of it will be happy bold words, or even what these words will be.
We only know the proposal, and for my sins, I have read it several times. I can report that it has its bad moments, but that these are vastly outweighed by its banality. Someday, perhaps somebody will explain what it is about the international globaloid order that encourages the production of so much long, unreadable and clearly unnecessary verbiage.
The draft opens with a preamble, where the “Parties to the WHO Pandemic Agreement” spend a page and a quarter “recognising”, “recalling,”, “noting”, “reaffirming”, “reiterating”, “underscoring”, “acknowledging” and being “deeply concerned” about various things. Among the matters that they recognise is how great the WHO is, and among the things they are deeply concerned about are “the gross inequities… that hindered… equitable access to medical and other COVID-19 pandemic-related products”. This line, right at the beginning, is an important signal about what the Pandemic Agreement actually is. Contrary to many assessments, it is not a blueprint for global hygiene dictatorship, but rather a bureaucratic scheme to steer more magical “pandemic-related products” – above all, vaccines – into the Third World, where people are least interested in them.
Having cleared our internationalist throats, we proceed to Article 1, which defines various terms. Here we learn, for example, that the neologism infodemic “means too much information, false or misleading information, in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak. It causes confusion and risk-taking behaviours that can harm health. It also leads to mistrust in health authorities and undermines public health and social measures”.
Yes, the WHO worries that it is a problem if we the rabble are exposed to “too much information”; infodemic levels of information may confuse us and cause us to self-harm. It is easy to worry about things like this, but perhaps harder to recognise that these are little more than free-floating concepts in the proposal, tied to no concrete provisions at all. Despite its appearance in the introductory glossary, for example, the word “infodemic” occurs only once more in the entire text. This is in Article 9, section 2, subsection (d), where the parties to the treaty are commanded to “promote… knowledge translation and evidence-based communication tools… relating to pandemic prevention… including infodemic management”. What the significance of this can be, given that all of our countries are already deeply interested in virus propaganda, is very unclear, and our proposal has no interest in specifying.
Another term requiring definition in Article 1 is the “One Health approach”. This means:
An integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimise the health of people, animals and ecosystems. It recognises that the health of humans, domestic and wild animals, plants and the wider environment (including ecosystems) is closely linked and interdependent. The approach mobilises multiple sectors, disciplines and communities at varying levels of society to work together to foster well-being and tackle threats to health and ecosystems, while addressing the collective need for clean water, energy and air, safe and nutritious food, taking action on climate change, and contributing to sustainable development.
There is a great drive among the globaloids to gather all their separate agendas and initiatives behind the same unifying principles. “One Health” is a way of making pandemic bothering also relevant to the Third-Worldists who want to improve bike sharing in the Democratic Republic of Congo and to the climateers who want to change the balance of the earth’s atmospheric gases. One Health means that everything can be about preventing pandemics, and that everybody will have a role to play during the next pandemic.
How bad “One Health” in the context of pandemic preparedness might be, however, is once again very unclear. It is the subject of a whole article (the fifth one), which is among the worst-written and worst-conceived sections of the whole document.
Have a taste:
The Parties shall promote and enhance synergies between multisectoral and transdisciplinary collaboration at the national level and cooperation at the international level, in order to identify and conduct risk assessments at the interface between human, animal and environment ecosystems, while recognising their interdependence, and with applicable sharing of the benefits…
The parties to the pandemic treaty are to “enhance synergies… in order to identify” not risks but “risk assessments”. Perhaps our pandemic agreers got lost in their own dependent clause. This identification, whatever its nature, must happen “at the interface between… ecosystems”, which come in three types – “human, animal and environment[al]”. As an “ecosystem” is the system of interaction between organisms and their environment, it is very hard to know what an “environment ecosystem” might be, or how this might differ from an “animal ecosystem”. Also curious is the contention that this identification is no good unless the identifiers are properly mindful of “interdependence”. All the jargon is there, all the correct genuflections to the right orthodox concepts, merely with a resolute indifference to communicating anything.
The vast majority of the proposal suffers from emptiness like this. Its authors demand more pandemic preparedness, more equity, more research, more virus surveillance, better healthcare systems in the developing world, more free chocolate, more peace and love. One of their favourite verbs is “strengthen”. It occurs 56 times. “Regulatory authorities” need to be strengthened, “rapid alert systems” need to be strengthened, “national public health and social policies” need to be strengthened, “sustainable pandemic prevention” needs to be strengthened, “health systems” need to be strengthened, something called “multisectoral coordinated data interoperability” needs to be strengthened, “synergies” need to be strengthened, and of course the “capacity to fulfil obligations arising from this agreement” and the “implementation of the WHO Pandemic Agreement” need to be strengthened. The practical force of this incontinent high-mindedness is totally obscure. Countries generally have the healthcare systems they can afford; to the extent that these systems are inadequate, that is because the countries that fund them cannot afford better. Healthcare in the Third World is not going to improve if everyone signs a treaty agreeing that improvements would be a good idea, not least because we live in a world where everybody already thinks that.
Beyond the poor writing and the emptiness, we encounter telling problems with thought and conception. In Article 3 (on “General principles and approaches”), for example, there is much blather about human rights, solidarity, responsibility, accountability and inclusiveness. I was very interested in item 11, on “Proportionality,” because if Covid has taught us anything about the pandemicists, it is that “proportionality” is something they should think more about. Behind this heading, however, we read only that “public health decisions for preventing, preparing for and responding to pandemics should be proportionate in a manner consistent with Article 2”. So we go back to the mercifully brief Article 2 (“Objective and scope”), which merely calls for… preventing, preparing and responding to pandemics. Pandemic response, in other words, has to be proportional to the commitment to respond to pandemics. How does something like this even get out of committee?
The first moment of substance comes in Article 8, on “Preparedness monitoring and functional reviews”. This binds signatories to conduct assessments of their “pandemic preparedness” “no less than every five years”. They are further required to “support the conduct of… appropriate simulation or tabletop exercises”. Finally, parties to the treaty must establish “a global peer review mechanism to assess pandemic prevention, preparedness and response capacities”. I guess this means that everybody’s pandemic preparedness experts get to review the work of everybody else’s pandemic preparedness experts. Pandemic preparedness means a great deal of bureaucracy, even more than we already have. It means spending more money and more time on self-promotional pandemic wargames for the media, writing more reports and above all employing more pandemicists. This is not good.
The heart of the Pandemic Agreement begins with Articles 10 and 11 on “Sustainable production” and “Transfer of technology and know-how”. The provisions here strive to attenuate intellectual property rights to make things like novel vaccines more readily available to the Third World. Bill Gates got his way in this section: these demands are interwoven with so many caveats that I have a hard time believing they will amount to much.
More significant and revealing of the managerial soul of the WHO is Article 12 on “Access and benefit sharing”. This would establish a “WHO Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing System (WHO PABS System)… to ensure rapid and timely risk assessment and facilitate rapid and timely development of, and equitable access to, pandemic-related products”.
Here’s how that would work: relevant pathogens are to be submitted to a WHO-certified lab, and their genetic sequences are then to be uploaded to a WHO-certified “publicly accessible database”. Any “benefits” arising from the use of this eminently WHO-certified information is then to be “shared fairly and equitably”. Specifically, anybody using the WHO PABS System – for example to develop a vaccine – must agree to give the WHO access to 20% of whatever pharmaceutical product they produce; the WHO will get 10% for free and will have the right to buy another 10% “at affordable prices”.
Now, I do not care very much about vaccines and I’m generally happy for the globaloids to harass the pharmaceutical industry if that’s what they want to do, but this is just boundlessly stupid. The WHO wants to erect a set of entirely useless bureaucratic procedures involving arbitrarily WHO-certified labs and WHO-certified databases, so that it can gain some vague ownership of the resulting data and leverage it to squeeze free or discounted “pandemic products” for the developing world out of manufacturers. This is basically an elaborate scam, which can only have arisen from the reluctance of developed nations to commit to any more concrete plan.
In Article 13 we encounter another bureaucratic innovation, this one called the “WHO Global Supply Chain and Logistics Network”. This network is to be “guided by equity” for “the needs of developing countr[ies]”. It will set targets for medical stockpiles and “assess” various logistical matters, again for the purpose of steering more vaccines into the Third World. The network will set up a “dashboard” (but of course) “of manufacturers and suppliers”, identify “purchasing mechanisms”, promote “transparency”, and a lot of other multi-syllabic things that in practice will probably amount to little more than a lot of well-paid WHO goons darting about the world and tallying things on clipboards.
Ensuing articles on “Regulatory strengthening” (that word again!), “Compensation and liability management”, “International collaboration and cooperation”, “Whole-of-Government and whole-of-society approaches” descend once more into a verbal fog about all the great things everybody needs to do more of. The only remotely interesting item here is Article 18, on “communication and public awareness”:
The Parties shall strengthen [LOL] science, public health and pandemic literacy in the population, as well as access to information on pandemics and their effects and drivers, and combat false, misleading, misinformation or disinformation, including through effective international collaboration and cooperation…
The Parties shall, as appropriate, conduct research and inform policies on factors that hinder adherence to public health and social measures in a pandemic and trust in science and public health institutions.
The Parties shall promote and apply a science- and evidence-informed approach to effective and timely risk assessment and public communication.
None of this sounds very good, but again, it’s crucial to remember that all of our countries already want to do all of this. They don’t need the encouragement of a treaty, and it’s hard to read these words as anything but the sublimation of their existing aspirations.
My verdict on all of this has a lot in common with an analysis that the Neue Zürcher Zeitung published last December. The Pandemic Agreement is above all concerned with expanding and enhancing the prerogatives of the WHO bureaucracy. That is not great, but it is also not world hygiene totalitarianism. The Pandemic Agreement abounds with glittering aspirations for better healthcare, better medicine and better One Health, but from the first article to the last page it is entirely devoid of concrete, practical measures to achieve any of these things. Its primary aim is to bleed pharmaceutical products and financial resources from wealthier countries for the developing world, but with a few exceptions like the idiotic (and laughably transparent) WHO PABS scam, even this aspect of its agenda seems vague and under-realised. I suspect that this deeply stupid monstrosity will be further attenuated and nebulised before it’s ever put to a vote.
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should have done a cost/benefit analysis
Which civil servant, government minister, or government scientist would have dared say that to Big Pharma?
Yes – imagine standing up for the rights of babes in arms!
And imagine how horrendously common sense has to be have been destroyed or overwhelmed to allow this to happen.
Should have said ministers could only impose this if they had defeated either Anthony Joshua or Tyson Fury in a bare-knuckle boxing contest.
If pushed, a win over Frank Bruno, Lennox Lewis or David Haye would have sufficed….
COST Soul
BENEFIT: Knighthood, Trip on Air Epstein v2 etc.
Well, who’d have thought it?
Great job lockdowners.
I’ve had big blazing arguments here with the “it’s just a mask, don’t be selfish” brigade.
I’d love to send them some I told you so’s but I really don’t think they will a) care or b) ever admit they were wrong. Also c) I’m fed up of arguing with lefties, 2 years is my limit.
Amazingly most of the comments on that article are “No, not true” “Well then you failed as a parent” – even when their own (left leaning is my understanding) paper reports an about face they won’t accept it.
The Daily Express isn’t leftwing. Why are you talking about the left anyway? I’m leftwing. Most of what is called the “left” is fake. Being in favour of a redistribution of wealth doesn’t mean I think a person with a todger and a pair of gonads should be called a “woman” if that’s what he’s mentally ill enough to think he is.
Tyson Fury has decided he needs your wallet more than you do so he’s redistributing it to his pocket.
Not many people seem to remember or (have ever known) that the common distinguishing feature of the left was a belief that a small minority of people had far too much wealth and power at the expense of others – those others constituting the majority of humankind.
For the benefit of those who don’t realise that, there was (and is) great difference of opinion on the left about what should be done about the situation.
Leftist political parties, on the other hand, became increasingly disinterested in all this and chose other topics on which to expend their vocal energies. Perhaps it got put in the too-hard basket. Their leaders were particularly exasperated by the differences of opinion on the methods to be employed in redistributing wealth.
Redistribution always tends to CONCENTRATE wealth even more.
Not always.
Except that the answer from the left was socialism.
This is like advocating punches from Mike Tyson as a healing aid for punches from Evander Holyfield.
I’m always advocating the speeches of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, JS Mill and W Churchill.
But I get called a Communist for doing so
That was one of the answers – and there were and are many different ideas on what “socialism” means, let alone how it should be achieved.
The ‘it’s just’ brigade are both moronically stupid and highly dishonest, ‘it’s just the government forcing absurdity on you because they can’ is an accurate summary of what really happened.
Don’t give up. They’re in it for the long-haul. And now, they’ve woken up their ‘sleepers’.
Send it to Ian Hislop at Private Eye. The former scourge of the establishment was a cheerleader for the “it’s just a mask, don’t be selfish” brigade.
Private Eye has become all but unreadable with its cheerleading for vaccines and many cartoons poking fun at so called ‘anti -vaxxers’ or anyone who does not follow and approve the government line on covid. The column by ‘MD’ is almost vomit making in its sycophancy. What on earth happened to their formerly excellent probing and enquiring journalism?
Agree with you 100% – I have had Private Eye on order for over 30 years and was greatly disappointed to see ‘M.D.’ stick his tongue right up Chris Whitty’s bottom.
P-Eye did do a ‘Profits of Doom’ expose of companies/people who enriched themselves ordering ‘PPE’ and suchlike, to be fair.
P-Eye’s ‘anti-vaxxer’ stance looks like it’s straight out of Susan Michie’s kitchen.
I dropped my subscription about five years ago. Private Eye is a pathetic comic which is no longer relevant.
It disappeared, followed shortly by my subscription.
Hislop was bought off years ago with tv and licence payer money. He is an establishment tool.
I’ll eventually be able to meet my parents again this year, after two years of being forcibly separated from them. The It’s just …-brigade is going to be entirely unsuccessful with their habitual attempt to downplay the detrimental effects of the nonsense championed by them by framing it as negligible whenever it was mentioned over here.
My idea of an appropriate reply to that would be That’s just a 4.4 lb military issue boot connecting with your shin, don’t make such a fuss about it!
Every time I pass a masked up kid I say out loud “child abuse!”
How can they say they didn’t know https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apzXGEbZht0
That was fascinating. Should be shown everywhere.
Thank you.
But at least we ‘controlled the virus’. Whitty/Valance and BJ need jailing.
Preferably with a 22-stone, hairy behemoth called Bubba, who’d make them ‘his little puppies’.
Preferably wielding a square ended broom handle.
Rough end of a pineapple would serve the same purpose.
I can think of far more suitable punishments than jailing that bunch.
Off you go to grab them then!
No shit, Sherlock?
I asked the very same question when face nappies were mandated as very young children identify with their mothers by facial recognition. If a mother chops and changes her facial appearance every-time she goes into somewhere where nappies were required, would this have an impact of the mother-baby bonding process. I guess any potential sociological impacts wont be fully identified for several years yet.
I wonder if in future criminal cases a defence will be “he was a child during Covid and didn’t identify with his mother or adults”, m’lud.
Maskmania
Of course they are.
Stunting the mental development of children apparently saves lives, according to the Branch Covidian Communist Doomsday cultist party.
‘First, do no harm’ (to Big Pharma).
Anyone heard about the new “hepatitis” epidemic in children under 10? Wonder why this is a thing…? I mean, it’s not like this could be in any way connected to the fact that Pfizer have said the vaccine tends to accumulate in the liver…
https://news.sky.com/story/hepatitis-parents-warned-to-check-for-signs-after-70-under-10s-found-to-have-liver-illness-12583961
Never would have occurred to me in a million f*****g years.
May they rot in Hell.
Selfishly I’m almost glad that this has given my own children a competitive advantage, having never had to look at a masked lunatic for more than 5 minutes and always whilst witnessing their father’s disdain and/or subsequent ridicule. Poor babes I’ve seen wheeled around by masked mothers. What an evil trick to pay on society.
The current generation of under fives will be the prototype slave generation.
With such confused emotions. The clip provided by Paul B shows a baby’s distress and bewilderment when encountering a switched-off or blank face, after experiencing an engaged one.
I’ve seen that vid before and it upsets me greatly.
now we have an outbreak of Hepatitis in children. Scientists are baffled. What could they have been exposed to recently?
Just had an unexpected mask challenge in the opticians of all places. Came as a bit of a shock and I hadn’t prepared for it.
It’s particularly infuriating that places populated by people with supposed medical knowledge are the ones still shitting on science. On the flip side I’m somewhat reassured by the way masking has been handled by the British public; awkward, uncomfortable but not in my experience that fascistic.
I had the same in specsavers. Told them I do not subscribe to ‘that nonsense’ he didn’t ask again! If you notice the maskists remain in all the places that are basically public sector and have no competition. If there is an opticians or dentists or doctors surgery that bans masks they would have all my business.
It’s absolutely disgraceful. Talk about advertising your idiot credentials.
HTF do we process this:
Saw a GP this morning – utter waste of time, space and taxpayers money – but I had to sit and listen to her nonsense with her masked up. And all the bloody medical staff were.
These people are supposed to have a grounding in science yet it appears none of them understand that these damned masks not only serve no purpose they actually undermine good health. Talk about rubbishing your own position.
I have lost almost all respect for GPs. A minority might have stood up against this anti-science, but the majority have enabled it, as they could have stopped all the nonsense in its tracks had they challenged the scam.
That’s exactly how I feel. I have more contempt for medical workers after the last two years than just about anyone, and that’s saying something.
I called mine out on it, her and the Asthma nurse were insisting I wore one, I basically said “look I’m not prepared to spend the other half of my appointment arguing with you, there’s decades of evidence that proves they do nothing, are you refusing to treat me or not?”. A most unpleasant experience for someone with severe anxiety who was dangerously depressed at the time.
An absolute disgrace frankly.
When asked in future which GP I’d like to see? I think I’ll answer, “One that didn’t wear a mask during Covid.” although I fear it might be a very short list.
Well done for making a stand. These morons need to be confronted.
You could have asked: “Are there any with British names?”
It’s completely infuriating. I don’t want anything to do with ‘healthcare’ ever again. Trust is at rock bottom.
The propaganda behind the wearing of muzzles has been 100% reprehensible and wrong. The only thing it appears to have done is make money for those involved
Remember 2006 when a Muslim woman was fired from her teaching assistant job for wearing a burka ?
Her job was teaching the children how to pronounce words.
Less than fifteen years later, teachers had to cover their faces in class.
This was a purposeful bombardment of absurdities from the government, aimed at its real enemy: the human mind.
It’s not over: Globalists still using covid-19 to mind control people into submission
https://www.newstarget.com/2022-04-06-globalists-using-covid-to-mind-control-people.html
By Arsenio Toledo
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That year, everyone had lost their minds, and decided to wear metal buckets on their heads. Because of Science. Anyone who didn’t wear a bucket on their head was taken out the back and pelted with rotten vegetables. They were good times. The following year, it was discovered that all the children’s teeth had fallen out and none of them knew their times tables. But this was considered a small price to pay, because of the Science. The people picked up the rotten vegetables and fed them to the children, because that was all they had left to eat. They painted the buckets blue and yellow, and stuck them back on their heads. Everyone said don’t worry, it was only a cock-up.
And everyone went out on a Thursday evening 8:00pm and threw rotten vegetables at their own houses.
made me so proud!
It is disturbing how easy it is to rid people of all sense of morality.
And all common sense as well!
That said, common sense was probably never especially common.
Witnessed this firsthand today on a train back from London. Empty carriage apart from me and mother with baby. She was masked and the baby was distressed. She used the mask like a game and pulled it down to say ‘mummy’ and the baby stopped crying. She would then pull it back up and it would cry again. I offered to move so she could remove the mask if she wanted but she declined and continued with the theatre. Was really sad to watch and could clearly see the child was very interested in my unmasked face.
Well documented https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apzXGEbZht0
Bloody woman certainly not fit to be a parent.
How frightening for a child in an already frightening situation, ie hospital, not to be able to be reassured by seeing its parent’s face and smile.
.
Yet another side effect that should have e been predicted but no-our “experts” like Va llance and the Proje t Fear group w ere too usy removing everyone civ il liberties to give a damn
Were the hospitals going to throw women out the door whilst in labour, if they tore of a mask and screamed at staff to eff off?
There is an awful lot of behaviour recently that can only be described as evil. The worst kind of abuse is being visited upon us and so many support it. I am depressed by the majority of my fellow humans.