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
For his first major action since taking office just two weeks ago, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has issued a 90-day stop-work order to American biotech company Vaxart Inc., which had been contracted during the Biden administration to develop a new “oral COVID-19 vaccine.”
Kennedy’s order came just as 10,000 individuals were scheduled to begin clinical trials on Monday.
HHS will utilize the 90-day hiatus to review Vaxart’s initial findings to determine the future of the human trials and continued drug development.
Approximately $460 million had been allotted to Vaxart by HHS to develop its new COVID-19 “vaccine,” of which $240 million had been authorized for the preliminary study, according to a report by Fox News Digital, which broke the story.
“While it is crucial that the Department [of] Health and Human Services support pandemic preparedness, four years of the Biden administration’s failed oversight have made it necessary to review agreements for vaccine production, including Vaxart’s,” Kennedy told Fox News Digital.
“I look forward to working with Vaxart and medical experts to ensure this work produces safe, effective, and fiscal-minded vaccine technology,” added Kennedy.
“If anyone was worried that RFK would not address vaccine damage, this is proof he’s only getting started,” declared the producers of the 2022 Died Suddenly film, which questioned the motives behind the development and mandating of the first round of COVID-19 shots and the startling number of deaths attributed to them.
There appears to be plenty of justification for pausing and even terminating Vaxart’s continued development of its “oral COVID-19 vaccine”
According to a report by The Defender’s John-Michael Dumais and published by LifeSiteNews in June, “Vaxart’s pill, VXA-CoV2-1, uses an adenovirus vector to infect epithelial cells in the lower small intestine. The vaccine delivers the genetic material to create the spike protein. The company boasts that a special coating allows the oral pill to survive the low pH in the stomach.”
“Johnson & Johnson’s (J&J) and AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccines also used adenovirus vectors,” noted Dumais, who explained:
The use of J&J’s vaccine was paused in April 2021 due to reports of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS), a severe blood clotting disorder. In July 2021, the FDA warned about the risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome with the J&J vaccine after approximately 100 cases were reported among 12.8 million vaccine recipients. With existing doses of the J&J vaccine having expired in May 2023, the vaccine is no longer in use.
AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine also caused blood clots, resulting in temporary pauses in its use in several countries. With declining demand, it was also removed from the market in May 2023.
Vaxart’s oral COVID-19 development project is part of the Biden administration’s $4.7 billion Project NextGen initiative, launched in 2023 to accelerate the development of new COVID “vaccines.”
Vaxart’s “vaccine” was funded through a contract with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), which falls under the umbrella of HHS’s Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response.
The pausing of Vaxart’s COVID-19 “vaccine” development can be seen as Kennedy’s first important move to fulfill his stated mission as HHS secretary.
Shortly after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was sworn in as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled Establishing The President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission (MAHA EO) to investigate and address the root causes of America’s escalating health crisis.
Chaired by Kennedy, the commission has four main policy directives to reverse chronic disease: Empower Americans through transparency and open-source data and avoid conflicts of interest in all federally funded health research; prioritize gold-standard research on why Americans are getting sick in all health-related research funded by the federal government; work with farmers to ensure that U.S. food is the healthy, abundant, and affordable; and ensure expanded treatment options and health coverage flexibility for beneficial lifestyle changes and disease prevention.
The MAHA EO came at a time when many Americans have lost trust in the nation’s healthcare system and are increasingly skeptical as to whether they are receiving honest answers about the causes of the country’s health crisis and how to improve it.
From LifeSiteNews
In the first year of COVID lockdowns Canada’s small-to-medium-sized businesses, many of which are family-run, lost a combined $60 billion in gross profit, according to recently released statistics.
On February 18 Statistics Canada released a report regarding “Borrowing, repayments and bankruptcies” from Ottawa’s Canada Emergency Business Account (CEBA) program, finding that businesses with less than $1.5 million in annual expenses “experienced a drop in gross profit, totaling a loss of nearly $60 billion” from 2019 to 2020.
The CEBA program was struck in March of 2020 to give out businesses affected by COVID lockdowns interest-free loans of up to $60,000. The loans came with strings attached, however, and had to be paid back by a certain date to only have to pay a partial amount back.
The report noted that the COVID lockdowns, which were imposed by all provincial governments as well as mandated by the federal government for the agencies it ran, from 2020 to most of 2021, were “most challenging for client-facing industries.
Businesses that reported the biggest declines in gross profit were “client-facing ones, such as food service and drinking places, hotels, and offices of dentists and physicians,” noted the report. Many of these are family-run businesses.
When it comes to bankruptcies, the report noted that they rose sharply from about mid-2022 to early 2024, notably coming after businesses had to start repaying the CEBA loans, which came due on January 18, 2024.
COVID vaccine mandates, as well as lockdowns, which came from provincial governments with the support of the federal government, split Canadian society. The mRNA shots have been linked to a multitude of negative and often severe side effects in children.
In many provinces, such as Alberta, small and medium-sized businesses also fought back via lawsuits against their governments and health agencies, which put in place COVID rules.
LifeSiteNews reported last November, that a class-action lawsuit on behalf of dozens of Canadian business owners in Alberta who faced massive losses or permanent closures due to COVID mandates, was given the go-ahead to proceed by a judge.
As a result of COVID dictates, many Canadians fought back, most notably in the form of the 2023 Freedom Convoy, which saw thousands of Canadians from coast to coast come to Ottawa to demand an end to COVID mandates in all forms. Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government enacted the never-before-used Emergencies Act (EA) on February 14, 2022.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, the Freedom Convoy’s two main leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber face a possible 10-year prison sentence. LifeSiteNews reported extensively on their trial, the verdict of which will be released on March 12.
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