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Brownstone Institute

Why is Everyone Concerned About the WHO?

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22 minute read

From the Brownstone Institute

BY Meryl NassMERYL NASS

Over the past two years you’ve probably heard about the attempted WHO power grab. Here’s everything you need to know to understand the status today:

Overview:

  • The build-out of a massive and expensive global biosecurity system is underway, allegedly to improve our preparedness for future pandemics or biological terrorism. In aid of this agenda two documents are being prepared through the WHO: a broad series of amendments to the existing International Health Regulations (2005) (IHR) and a proposed, entirely new pandemic treaty.
  • Pandemic Fund a.k.a. financial intermediary fund to aid preparedness worldwide has been established by the World Bank and WHO.
  • Multiple names have been used for the new treaty as new drafts are produced, such as: Pandemic Treaty, WHO CA+, Bureau Text, Pandemic Accord, and Pandemic Agreement.
  • Negotiations for these documents are being held in secret. The latest available draft of the IHR amendments is from February 6th, 2023.
  • The latest Pandemic Treaty draft is from October 30th, 2023.
  • Both the amendments and treaty are on a deadline to be considered for adoption at the 77th annual World Health Assembly meeting in May 2024.
  • WHO’s principal attorney Steven Solomon has announced that he crafted a legal fig leaf to avoid making the draft amendments public by January 2024, as required by the WHO Constitution.

How Would these Drafts Become International Law?

  • A treaty requires a two-thirds vote of the World Health Assembly’s 194 member states to be adopted and is binding only for States that have ratified or accepted it (Article 19 and 20, WHO Constitution). However, it could be enacted into force in the US by a simple signature, without Senate ratification. [See CRS report, “US proposals to Amend the International Health Regulations.”]
  • The IHRs and any amendments thereto are adopted by simple majority, and become binding to all WHO Member States, unless a state has rejected or made reservations to them within predefined timeframes (Articles 21 and 22, WHO Constitution; Rule 72, Rules of procedures of the World Health Assembly).
  • Last year, however, amendments to 5 articles of the IHRs were considered in opaque committee meetings during the 75th annual meeting, and then adopted by consensus without a formal vote. This process makes it harder to blame individual diplomats for their votes.
  • The current draft of the IHR Amendments would allow the Director-General of WHO or Regional Directors to declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), or the potential for one, without meeting any specific criteria (Article 12). The WHO would then assume management of the PHEIC and issue binding directives to concerned States.
    • PHEICS and potential PHEICs could be declared without the agreement of the concerned State or States.
    • WHO’s unelected officials (Director-General, Regional Directors, technical staff) could dictate measures including quarantines, testing and vaccination requirements, lockdowns, border closures, etc.
  • WHO officials would not be accountable for their decisions and have diplomatic immunity.

 

What are Some Specific Problems with the WHO’s Proposed Amendments?

  • Article 3 of the proposed IHR amendments removes protections for human rights:
    • Struck from the IHR is the crucial guarantee of human rights as a foundation of public health: “The implementation of these Regulations shall be with full respect for the dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of persons…”
    • This has been replaced with the following legally meaningless phrase: “based on the principles of equity, inclusivity, coherence…” 
  • Proposed article 43.4 of the IHR notes that the WHO could ban the use of certain medications or other measures during a pandemic, since its ‘recommendations’ would be binding:
    • “WHO shall make recommendations to the State Party concerned to modify or rescind the application of the additional health measures in case of finding such measures as disproportionate or excessive. The Director General shall convene an Emergency Committee for the purposes of this paragraph.”
  • States’ obligations in the proposed IHR Amendments would include:
  • Conducting extensive biological surveillance of microorganisms and people (Article 5);
  • Monitoring mainstream and social media and to censor “false and unreliable information” regarding WHO-designated public health threats (Article 44.1(h)(new));
  • Taking medical supplies from one State for use by other States as determined by the WHO (New Article 13A);
  • Giving up intellectual property for use by other States or third parties (New Article 13A);
  • Transferring genetic sequence data for “pathogens capable of causing pandemics and epidemics or other high-risk situations” to other Nations or third parties, despite the risks this entails (Article 44.1(f) (new)).

What are Problems with the Proposed Pandemic Treaty?

All the Pandemic Treaty drafts (as well as the proposed Amendments to the IHR) produced so far are based on a set of false assumptions. These include the following:

  • The WHO Constitution states that, “The WHO is the directing and coordinating authority on international health work.” Recently, to justify becoming the global director of health, the WHO disingenuously dropped the last word–and began claiming it already was “the directing and coordinating authority on international health.” But it is not and never has been. The WHO has always been an advisory body, responding to requests for help from member states. It has never previously been a directing or governing body with authority to govern member states. Here is the relevant part of its Constitution, on page 2:
  • The WHO claims that “international spread of disease demands the widest international cooperation,” which ignores the fact that international spread may be quite limited and able to be managed by local or national authorities; ignores that the most appropriate responses will be determined by the specific circumstances, and not by a WHO algorithm; and ignores that the WHO has limited infectious disease expertise relative to large nation states.
  • The claim made by WHO is that nations will be able to retain national sovereignty through their ability to pass and enforce health laws, while they will simultaneously be bound and accountable to obey the directives from the WHO on health. This is contradictory and designed to confuse: if the WHO can impose its public health decisions on member states, it and not the states will have sovereignty over health.
  • The tremendous cost and suffering from COVID are being blamed on lack of preparedness. However, the US was spending about $10 billion yearly on pandemic preparedness before the pandemic. Yet we had few masks, gloves, gowns, drugs, etc. when the pandemic struck. Why would we expect a central WHO authority, which relies on vested interests for 85 percent of its funding, to do any better?
  • The claim is that lack of equity led to failure to share drugs, vaccines, and personal protective equipment (PPE)–ignoring the fact that no nation had sufficient PPE or tests early in the pandemic, and that it was nations withholding generic drugs from their populations that caused important treatment shortages. Furthermore, now that we know the COVID vaccines result in negative efficacy several months post-vaccination (making recipients more susceptible to developing COVID), it is apparent that nations that were last in line for COVID vaccines and whose populations are mostly unvaccinated have fared better overall than those who received vaccines for their populations. The so-called lack of equity was fortuitous for them!
  • The claim is that pandemics invariably arise at the animal-human interface and that they are natural in origin. Neither is true for COVID or monkeypox, the last two declared public health emergencies of international concern, which came from laboratories.
  • The claim is that the vaguely defined “One Health approach” can prevent or detect pandemics and ameliorate them. Yet it remains unclear what this strategy is, and there is no evidence to support the claim that One Health offers any public health advantages whatsoever.
  • The claim is that increasing the capture and study of “potential pandemic pathogens” will be accomplished safely and yield useful pandemic products, when neither is true. The CDC’s Select Agent Program receives 200 reports yearly of accidents, losses or thefts of potential pandemic pathogens from high containment labs within the United States: 4 reports (and 4 potential pandemics) per week! And this is only within the US.
  • Drafts of the treaty and amendments assume that pharmaceutical manufacturers will agree to give up certain intellectual property rights.  In factneither developing nations nor pharmaceutical manufacturers are happy with the recent treaty proposal on intellectual property.
  • The claim is that the UN adopted a Declaration on pandemic preparedness supporting the WHO plan on September 20, 2023. In fact, 11 countries rejected the Declaration procedure and it was only signed by the UN General Assembly president, representing himself and not the UN General Assembly.
  • The claim is that the WHO has the legal right to require nations to censor “infodemics” and only allow the WHO’s public health narratives to be shared, yet this violates our First Amendment’s freedom of speech.
  • The claim is that health “coverage” (insurance) will automatically provide the world’s citizens access to a broad range of health care, while the primary reason for lack of access to healthcare is the lack of practitioners and facilities, not lack of “coverage.”

Here are some Specific Examples of What is Wrong with the Treaty:

Article 3, #2. Sovereignty

“States have, in accordance with the charter of the United Nations and the general principles of international law, the sovereign right to legislate and to implement legislation in pursuance of their health policies.”

This language fails to address the issue of the WHO assuming sovereignty for health matters over states through this treaty. It is a disingenuous attempt to grab sovereignty while claiming otherwise.

Article 3, #3. Equity

“Equity includes the unhindered, fair, equitable and timely access to safe, effective, quality and affordable pandemic – related products and services, information, pandemic – related technologies and social protection.”

However, Article 9, #2 (d) states that parties shall promote “infodemic management,” and infodemic is defined in Article 1(c) as false or misleading information. Article 18, #1 instructs the Parties to “combat false, misleading, misinformation or disinformation…” In earlier drafts the WHO spelled out that only the WHO’s public health narrative would be allowed to spread.

Article 4, #3. Pandemic Prevention and Public Health Surveillance

“The Parties shall cooperate with the support of the WHO Secretariat to strengthen and maintain public health laboratory and diagnostic capacities, especially with respect to the capacity to perform genetic sequencing, data science to assess the risk of detected pathogens and to safely handle samples containing pathogens and the use of related digital tools.”

While this section omits incentivizing Gain-of-Function laboratory research (which was included in the earlier Bureau draft) it does direct nations to perform genetic sequencing of potential pandemic pathogens (i.e., biological warfare agents) they find and to safely handle them, which requires high containment (BSL3/4) laboratories. Also in Article 4 is the need to “develop, strengthen and maintain the capacity to (i) detect, identify and characterize pathogens presenting significant risks…” indicating the directive for nations to perform surveillance to seek out such pathogens and study them.

Article 6, #4. Preparedness, Readiness, and Resilience

“The Parties shall establish, building on existing arrangements as appropriate, genomics, risk assessment, and laboratory networks in order to conduct surveillance and sharing of emerging pathogens with pandemic potential, with such sharing pursuant to the terms and modalities established in Article 12.” Article 1 (h) defined ‘ “pathogen with pandemic potential” as any pathogen that has been identified to infect humans and that is potentially highly transmissible and capable of wide, uncontrollable spread in human populations and highly virulent, making it likely to cause significant morbidity and/or mortality in humans.”

Why does the WHO require nations to go out and find potential pandemic pathogens (a.k.a. biological warfare agents) and supply both biologic samples and pathogens’ genetic sequences to the WHO, where they will be shared with pharmaceutical companies, research centers and academic institutions, as well as possible others? They are also to share the genetic sequences online, where hackers could obtain the sequences and produce biological warfare agents. Yet this behavior is prohibited by Security Council Resolution 1540.

Article 8, #3. Preparedness Monitoring and Functional Reviews

The parties shall, building on existing tools, develop and implement an inclusive, transparent, effective and efficient pandemic prevention, preparedness and response monitoring and evaluation system.”

Yet 4 different monitoring systems (“tools”–see graphic below) have been used to gauge nations’ readiness for pandemics and all 4 failed to predict how well they would do when COVID appeared. There is no acknowledgement of the failures of our assessment tools, nor discussion of whether there exist any useful assessment tools. And this begs the question why, if our means of assessing progress against pandemics failed, do we think that similar efforts are likely to be successful in future?

Article 10, #1 (d). Sustainable Production

“The Parties encourage entities, including manufacturers within their respective jurisdictions, in particular those that receive significant public financing, to grant, subject to any existing licensing restrictions, on mutually agreed terms, non-exclusive royalty-free licenses to any manufacturers, particularly from developing countries, to use their intellectual property and other protected substances, products, technology, know-how, information and knowledge used in the process of pandemic – related product development and production, in particular for pre-pandemic and pandemic diagnostics, vaccines and therapeutics for use in agreed developing countries.”

This and related sections are probably what make the pharma organization so upset with the current Treaty draft.

Article 12, #4 (a) i (2) Access and Benefit-Sharing

“Upload the genetic sequence of such WHO PABS (Pathogen Access and Benefits System) material to one or more publicly accessible databases of its choice, provided that the database has put in place an appropriate arrangement with respect to WHO PABS material.”

The treaty requires the sharing of pathogens and the need to identify and upload their genetic sequences online, where they will be accessible. This could also be called proliferation of biological weapons agents, which is generally considered a crime. In the US, “Select Agents” are those designated to have pandemic potential, and the select agent program is managed by CDC and USDA. For safety, CDC must give permission to transfer select agents. Yet the select agent rules are ignored in this WHO Treaty, which demands transfer of agents that could cause a worldwide pandemic. And in an apparent effort to handwave over existing rules, the draft states in Article 12, #8.

“The Parties shall ensure that such a system is consistent with, supportive of, and does not run counter to, the objectives of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Nagoya Protocol thereto. The WHO PABS system will provide certainty and legal clarity to the providers and users of WHO PABS materials.”

Article 13, #3 (e). Global Supply Chain and Logistics (SCL)

“The terms of the WHO SCL Network shall include: facilitating the negotiation and agreement of advance purchase commitments and procurement contracts for pandemic-related products.”

Advance purchase commitments are contracts that obligate nations to buy products for pandemics in advance, sight unseen. Neither the manufacturer nor the state party knows what is coming, but once WHO issues a pandemic declaration, the contracts are activated and the US government will have to buy what the manufacturer produces. The 2009 swine flu pandemic provides a useful example. Advance purchase commitments led to tens of billions in vaccine purchases in North America and Europe for a flu that was less severe than normal. The GSK Pandemrix brand of vaccine led to over 1,300 cases of severe narcolepsy, primarily in adolescents. Rapid production of vaccines for which profits are guaranteed and liability is waived has never once been a win for the consumer.

Article 14. Regulatory Strengthening

Nations are to harmonize their regulatory requirements, expedite approvals and authorizations and ensure that legal frameworks are in place to support emergency approvals. This incentivizes a race to the bottom for drug and vaccine approval standards, particularly during emergencies.

Republished from the author’s Substack


Further Reading:

The WHO’s Proposed Treaty Will Increase Man-Made Pandemics, by Meryl Nass M.D.

What Can Countries Do Right Now to Slow Down the WHO? (PDF Download)

Collected IHR Amendment Drafts

Collected Pandemic Treaty Drafts

Author

  • Meryl Nass

    Dr. Meryl Nass, MD is an internal medicine specialist in Ellsworth, ME, and has over 42 years of experience in the medical field. She graduated from University of Mississippi School of Medicine in 1980.

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Brownstone Institute

First Amendment Blues

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By Philip DaviesPhilip Davies 

You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU.

I’m envious. The US has something the UK doesn’t have, namely a First Amendment. Yes I know there are those who wish the US didn’t have it either, including, I understand, John Kerry and that woman who still thinks she beat Trump the first time around. Kerry kind of wishes that the First Amendment wasn’t quite so obstructive to his plans. But from where I stand, you should be thankful for it.

Not only does the UK not have a First Amendment, it doesn’t have a constitution either, and that makes for worrying times right now. Free speech has little currency with Gen Z and the way it looks, even less with the new UK Labour government. Even Elon Musk, who takes a surprising interest in our little country, has recently declared the UK a police state.

It’s not surprising. Take for instance the case of Alison Pearson, who had the police knocking on her door this Remembrance Sunday. They had come to warn her they were investigating a tweet she had posted a whole year ago which someone had complained about. They were investigating whether it constituted a Non-Crime Hate Incident or NCHI. Yes, you heard me right, a ‘non-crime’ hate incident and no, this is not something out of Orwell, it’s straight out of the College of Policing’s playbook.

If you haven’t heard of them, you can thank your First Amendment. In the UK you can get a police record for something you posted on X that someone else didn’t like and you haven’t even committed a crime. NCHIs are a way they have of getting around the law in the same way John Kerry would like to get around the First Amendment, except it’s real where I live.

Alison Pearson is a reporter for the Daily Telegraph, but that doesn’t mean she can write what she likes. When she asked the police what the tweet was which was objected to, she was told they couldn’t tell her that. When she asked who the complainant was, they said they couldn’t tell her that either. They added, that she shouldn’t call them a complainant, they were officially the victim. That’s what due process is like when you don’t have a First Amendment or a constitution. Victims of NCHI in the UK are decided without a trial or a defense. They asked, very politely, if Pearson would like to come voluntarily to the police station for a friendly interview. If she didn’t want to come voluntarily, they would put her on a wanted list and she would eventually be arrested. Nice choice.

It’s true that there has been a public ruckus over this particular case, but the police are unapologetic and have doubled down. Stung into action by unwanted publicity, they are now saying they have raised the matter from an NCHI to an actual crime investigation. Which means they think she can be arrested and put in prison for expressing her opinion on X. And of course they are right. In the UK that’s where we are right now. Pearson tried to point out the irony of two police officers turning up on her door to complain about her free speech on Remembrance Day of all days, when we recall the thousands who died to keep this a free country, but irony is lost on those who have no memory of what totalitarianism means.

The way things are looking I would say things can only get worse. The new Labour government has made it clear that it wants to beef up the reporting of NCHIs and make them an effective tool for clamping down on hurtful speech. You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU. Germany in particular is keen to remove all misinformation from the internet, I understand.

Whenever I see the word ‘misinformation’ these days I automatically translate it in my head to what it really means, which is ‘dissent.’ Western countries, former champions of free speech, the bedrock of liberty and individual choice, en masse it seems, now want to outlaw dissent. What is coordinating this attack on free expression, I don’t know, but it’s real and it’s upon us. We are slowly being intellectually suffocated into not expressing any opinion that others might find objectionable or that might contradict what the government said. If you had told me that would happen in my lifetime, I would have called you a liar.

I live in the UK, the home of the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta, and the mother of parliamentary democracy. I was proud that we produced men like John Milton, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Paine, that we understood the importance of the Areopagitica, the Rights of Man, and incorporated On Liberty into our social thinking. But those days seem long gone when police knock on your door to arrest you for an X post.

So I’m glad someone somewhere has a First Amendment even if we don’t. It may be your last defense in that republic of yours, if you can keep it.

Author

Philip Davies

Philip Davies is Visiting Fellow at Bournemouth University, UK. He gained a PhD in Quantum Mechanics at the University of London and has been an academic for over 30 years teaching Masters students how to think for themselves. He is now retired and has the luxury of thinking for himself. He fills in his spare time with a small YouTube channel where he interviews amazing academics and indulges in writing books and articles.

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Brownstone Institute

The Most Devastating Report So Far

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By Jay BhattacharyaJayanta Bhattacharya 

The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.

HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.

The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.

Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.

The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.

The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.

President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?

In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.

During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.

In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.

In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.

Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.

HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.

When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.

In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.

The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.

In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?

The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.

The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.

I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.

In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.

With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.

The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.

Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.

You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.

Author

Jay Bhattacharya

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a physician, epidemiologist and health economist. He is Professor at Stanford Medical School, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, a Faculty Member at the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute, and a Fellow at the Academy of Science and Freedom. His research focuses on the economics of health care around the world with a particular emphasis on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations. Co-Author of the Great Barrington Declaration.

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