Yes, The WHO Treaty Really DOES Limit American Sovereignty
By Marie Hawthorne
In December 2021, members of the World Health Assembly agreed to draft an agreement under the Constitution of the World Health Organization (WHO) to strengthen the world’s pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response. The plan has been to develop a draft, accept comments and amendments during 2023, and sign it into law in 2024. For the record, The OP posted our grave concerns about this back in 2021.
An Intergovernmental Governing Body (IGB) has been drafting this document, and they will be accepting feedback from “relevant stakeholders” regarding the final draft, as well as the addition of amendments. There are about 220 relevant stakeholders participating in this. Not surprisingly, they include civil society, academic, and health groups; the pharmaceutical industry is also well-represented, along with agribusiness groups. Some of these negotiations have been open to the media. Many have not.
President Biden has supported this effort from the beginning, and American groups represent some of the relevant stakeholders.
Much ado has been made over this the past few weeks, with voices on the right saying it’s going to kill Americans, and voices on the fact-checking left scoffing at all those conspiracy theorists who think the U.S. would sign over sovereignty to an international body.
Here’s what you need to know straight from the treaty draft itself.
So, what’s in this thing?
Let’s start off with the Zero Draft. This is public information readily available on WHO’s website. It’s about 30 pages long, so it’s readable. I’ll share some highlights.
Article 4, Section 3 states:
States have. . . the sovereign right to determine and manage their approach to public health, notably pandemic prevention, preparedness, response and recovery of health systems, pursuant to their own policies and legislation, provided that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to their peoples and other countries. (emphasis mine)
Who determines the damage threshold for when a nation loses its sovereignty? They don’t address that.
Article 10, Section 3h gets a lot of conservatives worked up.
It states that the WHO will receive 20% of pandemic related materials (vaccines, diagnostic tools, PPE, therapeutics) from wealthier countries for “equitable distribution” among poorer ones. And it involves “real-time” access, which means that the WHO will take their 20% when they want it, not when richer countries are ready to donate extra supplies.
Article 11, Section 4c addresses the need to strengthen and reinforce public health functions for surveillance using the One Health approach. One Health is a concept that gets addressed more thoroughly in Article 18.
Article 11 Section 4h addresses the need to create and maintain digital health and data science capacities. This translates to keeping everyone’s medical records online and readily available to health professionals. There are practical applications for this (like making sure people aren’t prescribed contra-indicated medications), but the privacy concerns are legitimate, too.
Article 15, Section 2 recognizes the WHO as the central authority, and gives the director general authority to declare pandemics. This means a director general in Europe could theoretically declare a pandemic in Southeast Asia without ever having set foot on the ground there. Incidentally, Southeast Asians see this potential, even though Americans may not. They’re concerned about it.
Article 17 is titled “Strengthening Pandemic and Public Health Literacy.” It discusses the need to tackle disinformation, particularly vaccine hesitancy. It also discusses the need to improve trust in science and government institutions.
What this really means is cracking down on dissenting voices.
Article 18 goes into a little more detail about the One Health approach. For the purposes of this draft, it means focusing on zoonotic (animal-to-human) disease transmission and strengthening surveillance systems that include animals as well as humans.
One Health refers to the notion that everything on earth is interconnected, and that the health of humans, plants, animals, fungi, bacteria all affect each other. This is true, but the practical application of One Health means giving public health bodies like the WHO oversight into animal husbandry practices. This is why agribusiness groups are listed as “relevant stakeholders” and have been part of the draft process.
Even though most mainstream sources now agree Covid originated in a laboratory, power-hungry types are still clinging to the threat of zoonotic diseases to justify reaching into ever more sectors of the worldwide economy. One Health is a way of using human health concerns as a pretext for world government bodies like the WHO to exercise control over livestock operations.
In Article 19, Section 1c, parties are expected to commit not less than 5% of current health expenditure to pandemic prevention.
This is another one that has conservatives up in arms. The U.S. spends far more on health than any country in the world; our public health expenditures in 2022 were over $4 trillion. American taxpayers would essentially be footing the bill for this new pandemic authority.
The money alone, I think, is reason enough for Americans to pay attention to this. Conservative lawmakers have been pitching an absolute fit about the financial obligations, along with the references scattered throughout the document about waiving patent protection for pharmaceutical companies.
Waiving patent protection means that Big Pharma won’t retain patents on any new treatments they develop; they will have to foot the bill for development, and then hand their research materials to other nations so that they can make their own pharmaceutical products. Big Pharma is furious about this part of the proposed treaty. Considering how many of their products get mandated by governments, though, I think they’ll survive.
And speaking of mandates, Article 22, Section 1 says that the first meeting of the WHO’s governing body will determine how to deal with noncompliance.
What does this mean for the average person?