WHO Pandemic Treaty Comes Up for a Vote

State sovereignty vs global healthcare.

(Photo by Lian Yi/Xinhua via Getty Images)

An amended draft of the WHO’s pandemic treaty and proposed International Health Regulations (IHR) will be considered at the World Health Assembly meeting in Geneva from May 27 to June 1. Once presumed a shoo-in for passage, the treaty and regulations have encountered dramatic push-back from member nations. This has included strong opposition in the United States at the state and federal levels. Key concerns include sacrificing sovereignty, collecting deadly diseases for international sharing, and transferring wealth and property rights to developing nations under the guise of equity. The grand hopes of the WHO may have exceeded the grasp of member nations.

The purported goal of a solid international pandemic treaty was to organize world “stakeholders” and governments to better prepare for a future pandemic. However, the plan has expanded to incorporate many controversial add-ons, including ubiquitous calls for “equitable” redistribution of intellectual property rights, technologies, vaccines and vaccine products, legal expertise, financial assistance, and even debt relief, with no mechanism to actually make these things happen.

The Zoological Angle

Equitable redistribution of property is just one hurdle of many. The treaty also embraces a “One Health” transition that incorporates plants and animals into regulation and monitoring, and the collection and sharing of potential pandemic diseases throughout the world in a network of biosecurity laboratories linked yet again to equity – poor nations and their doctors and researchers will have increased involvement in lab research and disease collection.

The treaty and regulations propose to seek out, identify, and study every conceivable “pathogen with pandemic potential.” This includes international monitoring and potential jurisdiction over farming practices and biosecurity measures. Article 12 of the latest draft pandemic treaty, ironically titled “Access and Benefit Sharing,” proposes to share the “benefits” of isolating and then widely distributing deadly pathogens:

“1. The Parties hereby establish a multilateral system for access and benefit sharing for pathogens with pandemic potential: the WHO Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing System (PABS System). 2. The PABS System aims to ensure rapid, systematic and timely access to biological materials of pathogens with pandemic potential and the genetic sequence data (GSD) for such pathogens….”

This proposed PABS is cause for many global citizens and their nations to balk at the WHO super-treaty. There is mounting evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic was unleashed by a sloppy laboratory conducting gain-of-function research. The WHO pandemic treaty and regulations whistle on with the narrative that Chinese customers in a live animal market were the disease’s origins, claiming a globalist technological repository for potential diseases must be created. But if COVID-19 was manufactured in a lab, the last thing the world needs is an exponential upscaling of nefarious gain-of-function research.

Open Borders and Universal Healthcare

Potential signatories may also pause at pandemic treaty plans to amplify human disease surveillance. Open US borders have ushered in the rampant spread of once-conquered diseases, including measles, polio, and tuberculosis. It is difficult to sell increased disease tracking systems when traditional immigration disease screening has been jettisoned by social justice ideology.

The treaty also binds all signatories to provide universal health coverage, (Article 1 (m)), which reads in part:

“… all people have access to the full range of quality health services they need, when and where they need them, without financial hardship. It covers the full continuum of essential health services, from health promotion to prevention, treatment, rehabilitation and palliative care ….”

Universal healthcare is a contested partisan issue: is this a treaty on which only Democrats can comment, or are Republican voices about the high costs and inefficiencies of a universal healthcare system permitted? Are illegals guaranteed universal healthcare?

The current draft pandemic treaty bites off more than any internationalist group can hope to chew. Its problem now is not vaccine hesitancy but a hesitancy to cede undefined – and, potentially, unlimited – power to an agency that has not cleaned up its numerous failures – and that problem isn’t likely to be fixed any time soon.

(Previously published at Liberty Nation.)