COVID-19
WHO health treaty a convenient cover for more government overreach: Bruce Pardy
From the MacDonald Laurier Institute
By Bruce Pardy
The updated regulations will transform the WHO from an advisory body to the directing mind and will of global health.
Last September, the CBC ran a hit piece on Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis after she warned that a new international pandemic treaty could undermine Canadian sovereignty over public health.
Catherine Cullen, the CBC journalist, quoted three academics to debunk Lewis’ claims. It’s nonsense, said Stephen Hoffman of York University. “So far from the truth that it’s actually hard to know where to begin,” said Kelley Lee of Simon Fraser University. It’s fearmongering, said Timothy Caulfield of the University of Alberta, as no treaty can suspend the Canadian Constitution. That last part is correct, but Lewis is right to be concerned. Under the guise of international cooperation, governments are devising a cover to enact even tougher public health restrictions next time a crisis is declared.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is drafting a new pandemic agreement and amendments to the International Health Regulations, which since 2005 have set out countries’ obligations for managing the international spread of disease. Member countries of the World Health Assembly are expected to approve both in May. The agreement would establish governing principles for an international pandemic management regime, and the updated regulations will transform the WHO from an advisory body to the directing mind and will of global health.
Technocrats learned a lot from COVID. Not how to avoid policy mistakes, but how to exercise control. Public authorities discovered that they could tell people what to do. They locked people down, closed their businesses, made them wear masks and herded them to vaccination clinics. In Canada and elsewhere, people endured the most extreme restrictions on civil liberties in peacetime history. If the new proposals are anything to go by, next time may be worse.
Under the new health regulations, the WHO will have the authority to declare public health emergencies. Countries will “undertake to follow WHO’s recommendations.” WHO measures “shall be initiated and completed without delay by all State Parties … (who) shall also take measures to ensure Non-State Actors operating in their respective territories comply with such measures.”
In other words, governments will promise to do as the WHO directs. They will make private citizens and domestic businesses comply too. Lockdowns, quarantine, vaccines, surveillance, travel restrictions and more will be on the table. Under the draft agreement, countries would commit to censoring “false, misleading, misinformation or disinformation.” During COVID, despite governments’ best efforts, dissidents managed to seed doubts about the mainstream pandemic narrative. In the future, things may be different.
WHO officials and proponents of the proposals won’t admit to any of this out loud, of course, and you won’t hear much about these plans in the mainstream press. But the draft proposals, at least the ones released, say so in black and white.
Many national governments will be on board with the plan. That may seem counterintuitive since it appears to diminish their control, but more valuable to them is the cover that WHO directives will provide for their own heavy hands. Officials will be able to justify restrictions by citing international obligations. Binding WHO recommendations leave them no choice, they will say. “The WHO has called for lockdowns, so we must order you to stay in your home. Sorry, but it’s not our call.”
That sounds like a loss of sovereignty, but it is not. Sovereign states have exclusive jurisdiction in their own territory. WHO directives would not be directly enforceable in Canadian courts. But national governments can agree to follow the authority of international organizations. They can craft domestic laws accordingly. That too is an exercise of sovereignty. They can undertake to tie their own hands.
Provinces might decide to go along also. Provinces have jurisdiction over many orders that the WHO might recommend. Lockdowns, vaccine mandates, quarantine orders and other public health restrictions are primarily provincial matters. The feds control air travel, international borders, the military, drug approvals and the federal workforce. The federal government’s power to make treaties cannot oust provincial legislative jurisdiction, but WHO cover for restrictive measures would appeal to provinces as well.
The WHO cannot suspend the Constitution. International norms, however, can influence how courts read constitutional provisions, and the meaning of the Constitution is fluid, as our Supreme Court is fond of insisting. If norms change, so might the court’s interpretation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The WHO’s proposals can’t define Canadian constitutional rights, but they aren’t irrelevant either.
Proponents would deny that the WHO is seizing control or undermining democracy. Technically they are correct. National governments must approve the new international pandemic plan. Without their agreement, the WHO has no power to impose its dictates. And not all countries may be keen on all the details. The WHO proposals call for massive financial and technical transfers to developing countries. But climate change pacts do too, and these were embraced by rich countries, unable to resist the virtue signaling and validation of their own climate boondoggles.
States that sign on to the WHO proposals retain the sovereignty to change their minds, but leaving international regimes can be hellishly difficult. When the United Kingdom belonged to the European Union, it agreed to be subject to EU rules on all manner of things. It remained a sovereign country and could decide to get out from under the EU’s thumb. Brexit threatened to tear the country apart. Having the legal authority to withdraw does not mean that a country is politically able to do so. Or that its elites are willing, even if that’s what its people want.
The WHO proposals prescribe authority without accountability, but they do not eliminate sovereignty. Instead, national governments are in on the game. When your own government aims to manage you, national sovereignty is no protection anyway.
Bruce Pardy is executive director of Rights Probe, professor of law at Queen’s University and senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
From LifeSiteNews
Associate Judge Catherine Coughlan rejected a lawsuit from more than 300 past and current members of the Canadian military who lost their jobs or were put on leave for not taking the experimental, dangerous COVID shots.
A Canadian federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit filed on behalf of some 330 past and current members of the nation’s military who lost their jobs or were placed on leave for refusing the experimental COVID shots, because she alleged that their lawsuit lacked “evidence” that the jabs were harmful.
The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) members had sought some $1.3 million in damages from the government for having their charter rights violated due to the military’s 2021 COVID mandates, according to their lawsuit.
In a November 13 ruling, Edmonton-based Associate Judge Catherine Coughlan ruled in favor of the Trudeau government, and thus military’s COVID jab mandate, to strike down the case. Coughlan remarked that the plaintiffs’ case lacked “material facts” along with “evidence” and was filled with “vexatious language.”
READ: Canadian father files $35 million lawsuit against Pfizer over son’s jab-related death
“The only indications of bad faith are found when the pleadings baldly assert that, among other claims, Canada failed to carry out safety and efficacy testing for the vaccines, and that the Directives were premature and ‘promoted the fraudulent use of the biologics’,” she wrote, overlooking reports of thousands of injuries due to the shots in Canada alone.
As a result of the lawsuit being tossed, all plaintiffs are now on the hook to pay some $5,040 out of pocket in legal costs.
As reported by LifeSiteNews in June, documents obtained by LifeSiteNews show that the number of jab injuries in the CAF rose over 800 percent in 2021, with the most being credited to Moderna’s experimental COVID shot.
The CAF members’ lawsuit was filed in June of 2023 and overall sought some $1 million in damages, along with an extra $350,000 in general damages. The lawsuit also had a condition that there be a declaration made that mandating the COVID shots for military members was a violation of their charter rights.
READ: Israeli boy featured in COVID vaccine campaign dies of heart attack at age 8
LifeSiteNews reported in July that a member of Canada’s military who was injured after taking the experimental mRNA COVID jabs has been denied compensation from the nation’s Veterans Affairs department.
Under the CAF’s mandate, hundreds of military members were fired, or one could say, purged for not getting the COVID shots. This is in addition to the thousands of public servants fired for not agreeing to take the COVID shots.
The CAF eventually ended its COVID mandate in October 2022, which was months after the federal mandate was lifted, but members are still “strongly encouraged” to take the experimental shot.
The federal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that its federal COVID shot workplace mandate would be dropped in June 2022, as would the mandate requiring domestic travelers have the shot to board planes and trains.
In November of 2023, a CAF member who spoke to LifeSiteNews under the condition of anonymity observed that the military considers members who refuse the COVID jab “a piece of garbage.”
READ: COVID shots have 200-times higher risk of brain clots than other jabs: new report
In March, LifeSiteNews reported on large personnel losses causing the CAF to consider dropping its remaining requirements altogether.
Although Canada has a Vaccine Injury Support Program (VISP) program, active members of the CAF, as well as veterans, are not eligible for the civilian program. According to Christensen, this leaves many COVID jab-injured CAF members and veterans with no recourse other than Veterans Affairs Canada.
COVID shot mandates, which came from provincial governments with the support of Trudeau’s federal government, split Canadian society. The mRNA shots themselves have been linked to a multitude of negative and often severe side effects, such as heart diseases, stroke, and death, including in children.
The shots also have connections to cell lines derived from aborted babies. As a result, many Catholics and other Christians refused to take them.
From the Brownstone Institute
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.
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