Brownstone Institute
WHO Accords Warrant Sovereignty Concern
From the Brownstone Institute
In agreeing to undertake to implement the WHO advisories, states will be creating a new system of pandemic management under the WHO authority and binding under international law. It will create an open-ended international law obligation to cooperate with the WHO and to fund it.
On 11 March, my article criticizing what appeared to be a slow-motion coup d’état by the World Health Organization (WHO) to seize health powers from states in the name of preparing for, conducting early warning surveillance of, and responding to “public health emergencies of international [and regional] concern” was published in the Australian. The coup was in the form of a new pandemic treaty and an extensive package of more than 300 amendments to the existing International Health Regulations (IHR) that was signed in 2005 and came into force in 2007, together referred to as the WHO pandemic accords.
The two sets of changes to the architecture of global health governance, I argued, will effectively change the WHO from a technical advisory organisation offering recommendations into a supranational public health authority telling governments what to do.
On 3 May, the Australian published a reply by Dr. Ashley Bloomfield, co-chair of the WHO working group on the IHR amendments. Bloomfield was New Zealand’s Director-General of Health from 2018–22 and received a knighthood for his services in the 2024 New Year’s Honours list. His engagement with the public debate is very welcome.
Rejecting the charge that the WHO is engaged in a power grab over states, Bloomfield wrote that as a one-time senior UN official, I “would know that no single member state is going to concede sovereignty, let alone the entire 194 members.”
I bow to the good doctor’s superior medical knowledge in comparison to my non-existent medical qualifications.
Unfortunately, I cannot say the same with respect to reforms across the UN system, or sovereignty, or the relationship between “We the peoples” (the first three words of the UN Charter), on the one hand, and UN entities as agents in the service of the peoples, on the other. On medical and not health policy issues, I would quickly find myself out of my depth. I respectfully submit that on sovereignty concerns, Dr. Ashley may be the one out of his depth.
On the first point, I was seconded to the UN Secretariat as the senior adviser to Kofi Annan on UN reforms and wrote his second reform report that covered the entire UN system: Strengthening the United Nations: An Agenda for Further Change (2002). The topic of UN reforms, both the case for it and the institutional and political obstacles frustrating the achievement of the most critical reforms, forms a core chapter of my book The United Nations, Peace and Security (Cambridge University Press, 2006, with a substantially revised second edition published in 2017).
I was also involved in a small Canada-based group that advocated successfully for the elevation of the G20 finance ministers’ group into a leaders’ level group that could serve as an informal grouping for brokering agreements on global challenges, including pandemics, nuclear threats, terrorism, and financial crises. I co-wrote the book The Group of Twenty (G20) (Routledge, 2012) with Andrew F. Cooper, a colleague in that project.
On the second point, I played a central role in the UN’s reconceptualisation of sovereignty as state responsibility and citizens as rights holders. This was unanimously endorsed by world leaders at the UN summit in 2005.
On the third point, in Utopia Lost: The United Nations and World Order (1995), Rosemary Righter (the former chief leader writer at the Times of London) quoted Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s description of the United Nations as “a place where the peoples of the world were delivered up to the designs of governments” (p. 85).
So yes, I do indeed know something about UN system reforms and the importance of sovereignty concerns in relation to powers given to UN bodies to prescribe what states may and may not do.
In agreeing to undertake to implement the WHO advisories, states will be creating a new system of pandemic management under the WHO authority and binding under international law. It will create an open-ended international law obligation to cooperate with the WHO and to fund it. This is the same WHO that has a track record of incompetence, poor decision-making, and politicised conduct. The insistence that sovereignty is not being surrendered is formulaic and legalistic, not substantive and meaningful in practice.
It relies on a familiar technique of gaslighting that permits plausible deniability on both sides. The WHO will say it only issued advisories. States will say they are only implementing WHO recommendations as otherwise, they will become rogue international outlaws. The resulting structure of decision-making effectively confers powers without responsibility on the WHO while shredding accountability of governments to their electorates. The losers are the peoples of the world.
A “Litany of Lies” and Misconceptions? Not So Fast.
Bloomfield’s engagement with the public debate on the WHO-centric architecture of global health governance is very welcome. I have lauded the WHO’s past impressive achievements in earlier writings, for example in the co-written book Global Governance and the UN: An Unfinished Journey (Indiana University Press, 2010). I also agree wholeheartedly that it continues to do a lot of good work, 24/7. In early 2020 I fought with a US editor to reject a reference to the possible virus escape from the Wuhan lab because of WHO’s emphatic statements to the contrary. I later apologised to him for my naivete.
Once betrayed, twice shy of the message: “Trust us. We are from the WHO, here to keep you safe.”
Sir Ashley was merely echoing the WHO chief. Addressing the World Governments Summit in Dubai on 12 February, Director-General (DG) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus attacked “the litany of lies and conspiracy theories” about the agreement that “are utterly, completely, categorically false. The pandemic agreement will not give WHO any power over any state or any individual.”
DG Tedros and Sir Ashley do protest too much. If Australia chooses as a sovereign nation to sign them, that does not mean there is no loss of effective sovereignty (that is, the power to make its health decisions) from that point on.
This is why all 49 Republican senators have “strongly” urged President Joe Biden to reject the proposed changes. The expansion of “WHO’s authority over member states during” pandemic emergencies, they warn, would “constitute intolerable infringements upon US sovereignty.” In addition, 22 Attorneys-General have informed Biden that the WHO writ under the new accords will not run in their states.
On 8 May, the UK said it would not sign the new treaty unless clauses requiring transfer of pandemic products were deleted. Under Article 12.6.b of the then-draft, the WHO could sign “legally binding” contracts with manufacturers to get pandemic-related “diagnostics, therapeutics or vaccines.” Ten percent of this is to be free of charge and another ten percent at profit-free prices. In the latest, 22 April draft, this last requirement comes in Article 12.3.b.i in slightly softer language.
The UK wants to retain the right to use British-made products first to address domestic requirements as judged by the government, and only then to make them available for global distribution. The draft, the government fears, will undermine British sovereignty.
On 14 May, five senators and nine representatives from the Australian parliament wrote a formal letter to PM Anthony Albanese expressing deep concern over the likely prospect of Australia signing the accords that “will transform the WHO from an advisory organisation to a supranational health authority dictating how governments must respond to emergencies which the WHO itself declares.” If adopted and implemented into Australian law, they wrote, these would give the WHO “an unacceptable level of authority, power and influence over Australia’s affairs under the guise of declaring ‘emergencies’.”
“Legally Binding” vs “Loss of Sovereignty” is a Distinction without a Difference
They can’t all be part of a global conspiracy to peddle a litany of lies. The WHO is offering up a highly specious argument. Sir Ashley didn’t really engage with the substance of my arguments either. He dismissed criticism of the proposed changes as “an attempt by the WHO to gain the power to dictate to countries what they must do in the event of a pandemic” as a “misconception.”
The G20 Leaders’ Bali Declaration (November 2022, paragraph 19) supported the goal of a “legally binding instrument that should contain both legally binding and non-legally binding elements to strengthen pandemic planning, preparedness and response (PPR) and amendments to the IHR.” In September 2023, the G20 Delhi Leaders’ Declaration (28:vi) envisioned “an ambitious, legally binding WHO” accord “as well as amendments to better implement” the IHR.
Lawrence Gostin, actively involved in the negotiations, was co-author of a report last December that said containing transnational outbreaks under WHO leadership “may require all states to forgo some level of sovereignty.” A joint Reuters-World Economic Forum article on 26 May 2023 stated: “For the new more wide-reaching pandemic accord, member states have agreed that it should be legally binding.”
The WHO itself describes the IHR as “an instrument of international law that is legally-binding on 196 countries.” Last year it published a document that includes section 4.6 on “legally binding international instruments” such as a new pandemic accord.
I get the argument that sovereign states are voluntarily agreeing to this. In terms of legal technicality, it might well be more accurate, as Libby Klein suggests in her draft letter to Australian MPs, to use words and phrases like “ceding autonomy,” “yielding “effective control over public health decisions,” “outsourcing public health decision-making to the WHO,” or “offshoring our public health decision-making.” This is the legalistic distinction that Bloomfield is effectively making.
However, simply because states must voluntarily sign the new WHO accords doesn’t mean they will not be ceding sovereignty once the accords are adopted. With all due respect to Dr. Tedros and Sir Ashley, this is a distinction without a difference. Every single “legally binding” requirement will mean a transfer of effective decision-making power on health issues to the WHO. That is a curtailment of state sovereignty and it is disingenuous to deny it.
Since the creation of the United Nations in 1945, states have been required to conduct themselves increasingly in conformity with international standards. And it is the UN system that sets most of the relevant international standards and benchmarks of state behaviour.
For example, for centuries countries had the absolute right to wage wars of aggression and defence as an acknowledged and accepted attribute of sovereignty. By adopting the United Nations Charter in 1945, they gave up the right to wage aggressive wars. I am very glad they did so. Just because the surrender of this aspect of sovereignty was voluntary, it doesn’t mean there was no surrender of sovereignty.
Similarly, by signing the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), Australia and around 185 states surrendered their sovereign right to make or get the nuclear bomb. Again, I am very glad they did so.
Article 10 of the treaty does permit withdrawal after a three-month notice to other states parties and the UN Security Council:
Each Party shall in exercising its national sovereignty have the right to withdraw from the Treatyif it decides that extraordinary events…have jeopardisedthe supreme interests of its country.
Australia could still act as a sovereign state and pull out of the NPT but, absent exculpatory events, only at the reputational cost of acting illegally under international law.
North Korea first announced withdrawal from the NPT in 1993, suspended the withdrawal, withdrew in 2003, has conducted six nuclear tests since 2006, and acquired up to 50 bombs. Yet, the UN has refused to accept the withdrawal and it is still listed on the UN website as an NPT member, with the explanatory note that: “States parties to the Treaty continue to express divergent views regarding the status of the DPRK under the NPT.”
Like these two important examples, states will lose key parts of the right to exercise their sovereignty over national policy settings and decisions on health if the WHO accords are adopted. It is their sovereign right to reject the treaties now. They should exercise it before it is too late. The complications entangling the post-Brexit referendum in the UK demonstrate only too vividly how challenging it can be for a state to extricate itself from a supranational authority despite the sovereign right to do so.
The best way to allay these fears and concerns would be to return responsibility to where accountability lies: with the national government and parliament. States should learn to cooperate better in global pandemic management, not hand effective decision-making powers and authority to unelected and unaccountable international technocrats.
The Effort Should Be Put on Indefinite Hold
It is an iron law of politics that any power that can be abused, will be abused by someone, somewhere, some time in the future. For current examples of overreach by a technocrat, look no further than Australia’s eSafety Commissioner. The truly frightening thing about her example is the realisation of just how much her efforts have been deliberately embedded in a global campaign to “bureaucratise” and control the internet.
A softer conclusion is that powers once granted over citizens to authorities are far more difficult to claw back than not giving them the powers in the first place. Thus far from retreating, the Censorship-Industrial Complex is simultaneously being broadened to embrace additional sectors of governance and public policy and globalised.
A report from Leeds University documented that pandemics are rare events. They are not becoming more frequent. For poor countries, their global disease burden is much lower than that of the big killer diseases like TB, malaria, and HIV/AIDS. For industrialised countries like Australia, the disease burden has been greatly reduced since the Spanish flu with improved surveillance, response mechanism, and other public health interventions.
There is no emergency justifying the rushed process. An immediate pause and a slow and deliberative process would lead to better policy development and deliver better national and global health policy outcomes.
“Pause for thought, argue for a wider delay, think it through properly. And don’t sign till it’s right.” David Frost, who led the UK Brexit negotiations.
Just so.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
How many genuine, shocking – and unexposed – scandals actually occurred in the last four years? To partially answer this question, I composed another of my List Columns.
The Most Epic of Scandals Might Be…
The world’s most epic scandal might be the massive number of citizens who’ve died prematurely in the last four years. This scandal could also be expressed as the vast number of people whose deaths were falsely attributed to Covid.
My main areas of focus – “early spread” – informed my thinking when I reached this stunning conclusion: Almost every former living person said to have died “from Covid” probably did not die from Covid.
The scandal is that (unreported) “democide” occurred, meaning that government policies and deadly healthcare “guidance” more plausibly explain the millions of excess deaths that have occurred since late March 2020.
My research into early spread suggests that the real Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of Covid should have already been known by the lockdowns of mid-March 2020.
If, as I believe, many millions of world citizens had already contracted this virus and had not died, the Covid IFR would be the same, or perhaps even lower, than the IFR for the common flu – said to be 1 death per 1,000 infections (0.1 percent).
Expressed differently, almost 100 percent of people who contracted this virus did not die from it – a fact which could and should have been known early in the “pandemic.” The fact this information was concealed from the public qualifies as a massive scandal.
Evidence That Would ‘Prove’ This Scandal
Furthermore, one does not need early spread “conjecture” to reach the conclusion that only a minute number of people who were infected by this virus later died from Covid.
After April 2020, a researcher could pick any large group or organization and simply ascertain how many people in these groups later died “from Covid.”
For example, more than 10,000 employees work for the CDC. About 10 months ago, I sent an email to the CDC and asked their media affairs department how many of the CDC’s own employees have died from Covid in the past three-plus years.
This question – which would be easy to answer – was never answered. This example of non-transparency is, to me, a massive “tell” and should be “scandalous.”
To be more precise, if the CDC could document that, say, 10 of their employees had died from Covid, this would equate to a disease with a mortality risk identical to the flu.
My strong suspicion is that fewer than 10 CDC employees have died from Covid in the last four years, which would mean the CDC knows from its own large sample group that Covid is/was not more deadly than influenza.
I’ve performed the same extrapolations with other groups made up of citizens whose Covid deaths would have made headlines.
For example, hundreds of thousands if not millions of high school, college, and pro athletes must have contracted Covid by today’s date. However, it is a challenge to find one definitive case of a college or pro athlete who died from Covid.
For young athletes – roughly ages 14 to 40 – the Covid IFR is either 0.0000 percent or very close to this microscopic fraction.
One question that should be obvious given the “athlete” example is why would any athlete want or need an experimental new mRNA “vaccine” when there’s a zero-percent chance this disease would ever kill this person?
The scandal is that sports authorities – uncritically accepting “guidance” from public health officials – either mandated or strongly encouraged (via coercion) that every athlete in the world receive Covid shots and then, later, booster shots.
Of course, the fact these shots would be far more likely to produce death or serious adverse events than a bout with Covid should be a massive scandal.
More Scandals
Needless to say, all the major pediatrician groups issued the same guidance for children.
In Pike County, Alabama, I can report that in four years no child/student between the ages of 5 and 18 has died from Covid.
I also recognize that the authorized “fact” is that millions of Americans have now “died from Covid.” However, I believe this figure is a scandalous lie, one supported by PCR test results that would be questioned in a world where investigating certain scandals was not taboo.
Yet another scandal is that officials and the press de-emphasized the fact the vast majority of alleged victims were over the age of 79, had multiple comorbid conditions, were often nursing home residents, and, among the non-elderly, came from the poorest sections of society.
These revelations – which would not advance the desired narrative that everyone should be very afraid – are similar to many great scandals that have been exposed from time to time in history.
Namely, officials in positions of power and trust clearly conspired to cover up or conceal information that would have exposed their own malfeasance, professional incompetence, and/or graft.
This Might Be the No. 1 Scandal of Our Times
As I’ve written ad nauseam, perhaps the most stunning scandal of our times is that all-important “truth-seeking” organizations have become completely captured.
At the top of this list are members of the so-called Fourth Estate or “watchdog” press (at least in the corporate or “mainstream” media).
In previous articles, I’ve estimated that at least 40,000 Americans work as full-time journalists or editors for mainstream “news organizations.” Hundreds of MSM news-gathering organizations “serve” their readers and viewers.
In this very large group, I can’t think of one journalist, editor, publisher, or news organization who endeavored to expose any of the dubious claims of the public health establishment.
When 100 percent of professionals charged with exposing scandals are themselves working to conceal shocking revelations…this too should qualify as a massive scandal.
To the above “captured classes” one could add college professors and administrators, 99 percent of plaintiffs’ trial lawyers, 100 percent of CEOs of major corporations, almost all elected politicians, and, with the exception of perhaps Sweden, every one of the public health agencies in the world, plus all major medical groups and prestigious science journals.
Or This Might Be Our Greatest Scandal
Yet another scandal – perhaps the most sinister of them all – would be the coordinated conspiracy to silence, muffle, intimidate, bully, cancel, demonetize, and stigmatize the classes of brave and intelligent dissidents who have attempted to reveal a litany of shocking truths.
The Censorship Industrial Complex (CIC) is not a figment of a conspiracy theorist’s imagination.
The CIC is as real as Media Matters, News Guard, The Trusted News Initiative, the Stanford Virality Project, and the 15,000-plus “content moderators” who probably still work for Facebook.
Government officials in myriad agencies of “President” Joe Biden’s administration constantly pressured social media companies to censor content that didn’t fit the authorized narrative (although these bullying projects didn’t require much arm-twisting).
Here, the scandal is that the country’s “adults in the room” were identified as grave threats to the agenda of the Powers that Be and were targeted for extreme censorship and punishment.
When people and organizations principled enough to try to expose scandals are targeted by the State and the State’s crony partners, this guarantees future scandals are unlikely to be exposed…which means the same unexposed leaders are going to continue to inflict even greater harm on the world population.
This Scandal Is Hard to Quantify
Other scandals are more difficult to quantify. For example, it’s impossible to know how many citizens now “self-censor” because they know the topics they should not discuss outside of conversations with close friends.
This point perhaps illustrates the state of the world’s “New Normal” – a now-accepted term that is scandalous if one simply thinks about the predicates of this modifier.
It should be a scandal that the vast majority of world citizens now eagerly submit to or comply with the dictates and speech parameters imposed on them by the world’s leadership classes.
The “New Normal” connotes that one should accept increasing assaults on previously sacrosanct civil liberties.
What is considered “normal” – and should now be accepted without protest – was, somehow, changed.
As I routinely write, what the world has lived through the past four-plus years is, in fact, a New Abnormal.
This Orwellian change of definition would qualify as a shocking scandal except for the fact most people now self-censor to remain in the perceived safety of their social and workplace herds.
The bottom line – a sad one – might be that none of the above scandals would have been possible if more members of the public had been capable of critical thinking and exhibited a modicum of civic courage.
As it turns out, the exposure of scandals would require large numbers of citizens to look into the mirror (or their souls) and perform self-analysis, an exercise in introspection that would not be pain-free.
It’s also a scandal our leaders knew they could manipulate the masses so easily.
Considering all of these points, it seems to me that the captured leadership classes must have known that the vast majority of the population would trust the veracity of their claims and policy prescriptions.
That is, they knew there would be no great pushback from “the masses.”
If the above observation isn’t a scandal, it’s depressing to admit or acknowledge this is what happened.
To End on a Hopeful Note
What gives millions of citizens hope is that, belatedly, more citizens might be growing weary of living in a world where every scandal cannot be exposed.
Donald Trump winning a presidential election by margins “too big to steal” is a sign of national hope.
Mr. Trump nominating RFK, Jr. to supervise the CDC, NIH, and FDA is definitely a sign of hope, an appointment that must outrage and terrify the world’s previous leadership classes.
For far too long, America’s greatest scandal has been that no important scandals can be exposed. Today, however, it seems possible this state of affairs might not remain our New Normal forever.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health”
Didn’t give much thought to freedom until four years ago, at age 63. Freedom was just there, like the water surrounding a goldfish. And then the Covid-19 pandemic blew in, the world locked down, and admonitions to “stay the ‘$^#&’ home” blazed through social media. No freedom was too important to discard in the name of public safety: jobs, family businesses, artistic endeavours, public meetings, social connections that kept despair at bay, all took a backseat to the grim business of saving grandma (who ended up getting Covid anyway). No discussion of moral or practical trade-offs, no pushback from the press, nothing. It felt wrong to me on a cellular level.
Apparently I was the only one in my middle-class liberal circle to harbour misgivings about this astonishing new world. If I tried, ever so timidly, to articulate my concerns on Facebook or Twitter, the online warriors shot back with a string of epithets. “Go lick a pole and catch the virus,” said one. “Crawl back into your cave, troglodyte,” said another. And my all-time favourite: “You’re nothing but a mouth-breathing Trumptard.”
From the get-go, I perceived Covid as more of a philosophical problem than a scientific one. As I wrote on more than one occasion, science can inform our decisions, but not dictate them. What ultimately powers our choices are the values we hold. I saw Covid as a morality play, with freedom and safety cast as the duelling protagonists, and it looked like safety was skipping to an easy victory.
It was a heady time for the health bureaucrats, whose increasingly arcane rules betrayed a naked impulse to control: the Canadian high-school students required to use masks on both their faces and their wind instruments during band practice, the schoolchildren forced (for hygiene reasons) to study on their knees for hours in an Alaska classroom, the “glory-hole” sex advised by the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. The lack of public pushback against these absurdities heightened my awareness of the fragility of our freedoms.
One of the earliest memes to surface during the pandemic was “muh freedumb.” The locution became a shorthand for a stock character – a tattooed man wearing camo gear and a baseball cap, spewing viral particles while yelling about his rights. A selfish idiot. The memes kept coming: “Warning, cliff ahead: keep driving, freedom fighter.” “Personal freedom is the preoccupation of adult children.” Freedom, for centuries an aspiration of democratic societies, turned into a laughing stock.
Eventually, pro-freedom voices began trickling into the public arena. I wasn’t alone, after all. There were others who understood, in the words of Telegraph writer Janet Daley, that the institutional response to Covid-19 had steamrolled over “the dimension of human experience which gives meaning and value to private life.” Lionel Shriver decried how “across the Western world, freedoms that citizens took for granted seven months ago have been revoked at a stroke.” And Laura Dodsworth brought tears to my eyes when she wrote, in her 2021 book A State of Fear, that she feared authoritarianism more than death.
Once the vaccines rolled out, the war on freedom of conscience went nuclear. If you breathed a word against the products, or even the mandates, you were “literally killing people.” The hostility towards the “unvaxxed” culminated in a Toronto Star front page showcasing public vitriol, splashed with such sentiments as: “I honestly don’t care if they die from Covid. Not even a little bit.”
This, too, felt viscerally wrong. I knew several people who had refused the vaccine, and they all had well-articulated reasons for their stance. If they didn’t fully trust the “safe and effective” bromide recycled by all government and pharmaceutical industry spokespeople, I could hardly blame them. (And I say this as someone who writes for Big Pharma and got five Covid shots.)
One of the most deplorable casualties of Covid culture was freedom of expression, a core principle in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Experts speaking publicly about the harms of lockdown faced systematic ostracism from mainstream media, especially left-wing news outlets. By early 2021, Human Rights Watch estimated that at least 83 governments worldwide had used the Covid-19 pandemic to violate the lawful exercise of free speech and peaceful assembly.
“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health,” the group wrote in a media release. “The victims include journalists, activists, healthcare workers, political opposition groups, and others who have criticized government responses to the coronavirus.”
But what about misinformation? Doesn’t it kill people? Newsflash: misinformation has always existed, even before TikTok. It’s up to each of us to sift the credible folks from the cranks. The best defence against misinformation is better information, and it’s the policy wonks’ job to provide it. Modern science itself depends on this tug-of-war of ideas, which filters out weaker hypotheses and moves stronger ones ahead for further testing.
Besides, misinformation comes not just from cranks, but from “official sources” – especially those tasked with persuading the public, rather than informing it. Remember when Rochelle Walensky, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US, asserted that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus?” Or when Anthony Fauci maintained that getting vaccinated makes you a “dead end” in the chain of transmission? I rest my case.
The marketplace of ideas is like a souk, with a lot of hollering and arguing and the odd snatched purse – and that’s exactly how it should be. It’s an ingenious and irreplaceable process for getting to the truth. There are few ideas too sacrosanct to question or too ridiculous to consider. That’s why, unlike just about everyone in my left-leaning circle, I take no issue with Elon Musk’s shakedown of the old Twitter, now the Wild West of X.
Under Musk’s algorithms, my feed has become a true philosophical souk, with wildly disparate views smashing into each other, leaving me to sift through the rubble in search of a gold nugget or two. Love him or hate him, Musk offers a much-needed counterweight to the ideological lockstep in much of the mainstream media. And when it comes to free speech, Musk has put his money where his mouth is: when media personality Keith Olbermann recently hopped on X, where he boasts a million followers, to call for Musk’s arrest and detainment, Musk made no move to censor him. Works for me.
While the “old normal” has thankfully returned to our daily lives, save the odd mask in a shopping mall or subway car, the stench of censorship that blew in with the pandemic has yet to dissipate. An obsession with disinformation permeates the zeitgeist, spurring lawmakers in several Western countries to censor the flow of thoughts and ideas that gives a free society its pulse.
We cannot excise personal freedom from a democratic society, even in the interests of the “public good,” without poisoning the roots of democracy itself. Article 3 of UNESCO’s 2005 Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights states this plainly: “The interests and welfare of the individual should have priority over the sole interest of science or society.” In our post-pandemic reality, the statement seems almost quaint. Nonetheless, it expresses an enduring truth: that a democracy must never discard the idea of freedom – even in a pandemic.
Freedom desperately needs a comeback from its current incarnation as an expendable frill. In my own small way I’m trying to make this happen: never much of an activist before Covid, I’m now part of a small group preparing to launch a Free Speech Union in Canada, modelled after the highly successful one in the UK. The organisation will offer legal advice to individuals facing censorship, cancellation, or job loss because of their words. I look forward to supporting people caught in this anti-freedom web, including those whose words I heartily disagree with.
My newfound respect for free speech is also what propels me to keep talking about Covid. The response to the pandemic exceeded the bounds of public health, and we need to expose the forces that drove it. Here’s Daley again: “The world went crazy. There is no other way to account for what was an almost nihilistic dismantling not just of particular liberties and rights, but of the very idea of liberty.” We can’t let it happen again.
Republished from Perspective Media
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