By Ben Johnson

Americans have just days left to weigh in on the Biden administration’s plan to adopt a dangerous international accord that gives the World Health Organization (WHO) greater control over the way the U.S. responds to global health pandemics like COVID-19.

As this article will demonstrate, the WHO Pandemic Agreement:

• Threatens national sovereignty;
• Equates the health of humans with animals and plants;
• Calls on nations to “combat” any “misinformation” that reduces “trust” in the government or its measures, such as social distancing;
• Would empower private-sector forces such as social media companies to ramp up censorship of disfavored viewpoints;
• Worries citizens will have “too much information” about pandemics;
• Supports quotas and “gender diversity”; and
• Aims to create equity-driven national health care systems around the globe.

To make matters worse, the Biden administration lobbied WHO to rename the Pandemic Treaty, so it can adopt the measure without the Senate’s ratification (which a treaty requires).

Background

The United States joined the World Health Organization in 1948. In March 2021, WHO members called for a new international pandemic “treaty” and began writing the first draft of the “legally binding treaty” on December 7, 2022. When the Biden administration signaled that it could not win Senate ratification as required by the Constitution, WHO transformed the “treaty” into the “WHO Pandemic Agreement” and released the negotiating text of the document last October. All 194 WHO member nations will vote on the agreement at the 77th World Health Assembly from May 27-June 1.

Eroding National Sovereignty

In its own words, the World Health Organization exists “to dispel the temptations of isolationism and nationalism.” The Pandemic Agreement naturally follows from its globalist mindset.

Under the WHO Pandemic Agreement, nations would retain their sovereignty only “in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the general principles of international law” (Article 3:2). The current “negotiating text” of the agreement is an improvement over the February 2023 “zero text,” which stated that nations have “the sovereign right to determine and manage their approach to public health … provided that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to their peoples and other countries.” That would allow WHO to take action against any national policy which it unilaterally determined was not in the best interests of its people, even if its citizens overwhelmingly supported the policy. (Ironically, an Associated Press fact check quoted this sentence as proof the agreement posed no threat to national sovereignty.)

The WHO Pandemic Agreement places a number of restrictions and demands on U.S. sovereignty:

• WHO takes a double tithe of U.S. vaccines, medicines, and equipment. “In the event of a pandemic,” the United States must give WHO “a minimum of 20%” of all “pandemic-related products,” such as vaccines or personal protective equipment, for global redistribution: “10% as a donation and 10% at affordable prices” (Article 12:4b(ii)(a)).
• Real decisions are made by nameless, unaccountable bureaucrats from around the globe. The agreement creates a “Conference of the Parties,” headed by a secretary, within one year of the treaty’s ratification. It will meet annually, or at any member’s request. “Only delegates representing Parties will participate in any of the decision-making of the Conference of the Parties” (Articles 21 and 24).
• The agreement will create a global medical force at WHO’s disposal. Member nations must create and fund “a skilled and trained multidisciplinary global public health emergency workforce that is deployable” to nations at their request to “prevent the escalation of a small-scale spread to global proportions” (Article 7:3).
• It gives The Hague jurisdiction over members’ disputes. If WHO is not able to solve disagreements between members, nations may agree to the “submission of the dispute to the International Court of Justice.” They may also settle things through arbitration by the Conference of the Parties (Article 34:2).

WHO: Abortion Is ‘Essential’ during Pandemics

Although it is not mentioned in the pandemic agreement, it is vital to understand that WHO considers abortion an essential service. In March 2022, WHO released a new “Abortion care guideline” stating that both chemical and surgical abortion should continue even during global health crises. “In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic … WHO has included comprehensive abortion care in the list of essential health services,” said the document.

It comes as little surprise WHO downgrades human life, considering its “One Health” proposal.

‘One Health’ Lowers Human Health to the Level of Animal and Plant Life

The most concerning aspect of the WHO Pandemic Agreement from a Christian perspective is its “One Health approach,” which lowers the infinite dignity of human life to that of animals and plants. According to the agreement, One Health “aims to sustainably balance … the health of people, animals and ecosystems,” which includes “taking action on climate change.” (Emphasis added.) Treatments that preserve human life and policies that lead to human flourishing, but which WHO decrees violate the ever-changing theories of climate change, have no place under the pandemic agreement’s One Health ideology. The agreement states One Health decisions can be based on “social and behavioural sciences” and will include “community engagement” (Article 5:4c).

While One Health is a new concept to most Americans, it has won support from one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals. “Modern attitudes to human health take a purely anthropocentric view — that the human being is the centre of medical attention and concern. One Health … thinking entail[s] a subtle but quite revolutionary shift of perspective: all life is equal, and of equal concern,” said a January 2023 editorial in The Lancet. “One Health will be delivered in countries, not by concordats between multilateral organisations, but by taking a fundamentally different approach to the natural world, one in which we are as concerned about the welfare of non-human animals and the environment as we are about humans. In its truest sense, One Health is a call for ecological, not merely health, equity.” (Its concern for “equity” and “decolonisation” led it to scold those “demanding that wet markets be closed to halt an emerging zoonosis.” One Health, WHO’s solution to global pandemics, would not halt evident pandemics.)

One Health’s concepts have been embraced by none other than Dr. Anthony Fauci. “Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior as well as other radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues. In such a transformation we will need to prioritize changes in those human behaviors that constitute risks,” Fauci wrote in September 2020 article for Cell. (Emphases added.) He highlighted “the extraordinary importance of human population growth and movement,” stating, “the more populous and crowded we as a species become, and the more we travel, the more we provide opportunities for emerging diseases.” Yet Fauci’s vision includes “minimizing environmental perturbations,” such as “intensive animal farming,” as well as “ending global poverty.”

While preserving the environment will likely require a radically lower standard of living for human beings, “probably very many, of the living improvements achieved over recent centuries come at a high cost.” He concludes that he would like “to bend modernity in a safer direction.”

Theorists at the global level have already formulated the next revolution after One Health: granting human rights to animals. “Not long ago, the very notion of human rights for nonhuman animals was easily dismissed as nonsensical,” but “each extension of rights to some new group has been ‘a bit unthinkable,’” wrote Saskia Stucki of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Germany. “The novel term ‘One Rights’ is proposed here as a normative companion to the scientific One Health approach. One Rights encapsulates the union of (old) human rights and (new) animal rights … The One Rights approach asserts that in a conceptual sense, human rights are animal rights and animal rights are human rights.” In that conceptual framework, “the treatment of animals in factory farms may be comparable to concentration camps.” (Emphasis in original.) Of course, “[S]ome old human rights would be incompatible with fundamental animal rights and would need to be retired, such as the right to injure and kill animals for culinary pleasure,” which she compared to “slave-owners’ rights.”

While the Bible forbids all unnatural cruelty, the Scriptures teach that God created only human beings in His image and likeness (Genesis 1:27) and that Jesus declared that humans are “much better than” the animals (Matthew 6:26). The WHO Pandemic Agreement’s “One Health” doctrine obliterates that two-millennia-old understanding.

Combatting ‘Misinformation’ and ‘Infodemics’

WHO’s controversial leader announced his desire to curtail dissent at the height of the pandemic. In February 2020, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared, “We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic. Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus and is just as dangerous.”

Yet WHO defines an “‘infodemic’ as too much information,” as well as “false or misleading information” which “leads to mistrust in health authorities and undermines public health and social measures.” (Article 1c. Emphasis added.) To assure citizens do not receive too much information, nations “shall” engage in “infodemic management” (Article 9:2d). Article 18 states this shall consist of “effective international collaboration” to “combat false, misleading, misinformation or disinformation.” They must study messages that “hinder adherence to public health and social measures in a pandemic and trust in science and public health institutions.”

The primary cause of public “mistrust” in public health institutions is those institutions’ self-contradictory spread of misinformation and disinformation about such “social measures” as masking, social distancing, quarantines, and the COVID-19 shot. WHO officials are not inoculated against this malady. WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who gained his position with China’s patronage, began the pandemic by opposing President Donald Trump’s flight restrictions from Wuhan and claiming the Chinese Communist Party’s handling of the coronavirus set “a new standard for outbreak control.”

Perhaps nothing unmasks the double-minded advice of public health “experts” than their gyroscopic changes on whether mask work at all. In April 2020, WHO released a guidance that discouraged universal mask wearing, which correctly noted, “One study that evaluated the use of cloth masks in a health care facility found that health care workers using cotton cloth masks were at increased risk of infection compared with those who wore medical masks.” In fact, a 2015 BMJ study found that cloth masks provide “almost 0%” filtration of viruses, and that “[m]oisture retention, reuse of cloth masks and poor filtration may result in increased risk of infection.” Yet WHO subsequently authorized masks for all God’s children ages six and up.

The most significant U.S. government official of the pandemic not only admitted to spreading misinformation but did so willfully, intentionally, and to advance a personal agenda. Dr. Anthony Fauci engaged in multiple flip-flops about wearing masks, initially deriding mask use, then mandating masks for toddlers at age two, then conceding that cloth masks provide little protection against COVID. Fauci explained that he changed his rhetoric to assure Americans did not snap up so many N95 ventilators as to create a shortage for health care workers. In time, then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky lifted the mask mandate after a significant change in public polling but no underlying change in the science.

Fauci also admitted continually changing the percentage of Americans who would have to have the COVID shot before achieving herd immunity. “I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’” Fauci said. 

The Biden administration repeatedly spread disinformation about the efficacy of the COVID-19 shot:

• Joe Biden promised, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
• In May 2021, Fauci said those who took the shot become “dead ends” for the virus. “When you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health and that of the family but also you contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community.”
• Walensky told MSNBC, “Vaccinated people do not carry the virus — they don’t get sick.”

Despite this track record, Biden tried to establish a Disinformation Governance Board headed by a millennial with a penchant for bawdy show tunes. Then again, the pandemic agreement says nations “shall” create “evidence-based communication tools” for “infodemic management” (Article 9:2d).

Americans have witnessed government attempts to “combat” narratives it brands false. When 15,000 public health experts led by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya signed the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued against closing schools and businesses, Fauci and National Institute of Health leader Dr. Francis Collins coordinated (in Collins’s words) “a quick and devastating published takedown” of the document. Yet America continues to suffer the ill effects of COVID lockdowns — including learning loss, a teen suicide spike stemming from an isolation-fueled mental health crisis, increased risk of myocarditis in young men, and the needless deaths of elderly nursing home residents in blue states  — years after Fauci’s quarantines ended. Collins, who identifies as a Christian, has since admitted taking a “narrow view” of COVID-19 mitigation.

Yet if the U.S. adopts the new accord, censorship will become a permanent, public-private partnership.

More Social Media Surveillance and Censorship

Article 17 of the Who Pandemic Agreement calls on nations to adopt “whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches” to promoting their message and policies. They should see that “communities, civil society and other relevant stakeholders, including the private sector” engage in the “implementation [and] monitoring” of government policies.

The government set up a portal flagging accounts for Facebook and Twitter to censor. The Twitter Files reveal how the government secretly blacklisted or outright banned thousands of accounts; Twitter boasted about impacting 1.5 million accounts in a little over one month. The Biden White House’s (taxpayer-funded) Office of Digital Strategy employed at least two dozen people to “monitor and, if needed, combat disinformation, including encouraging different sites to fact-check” stories, reported Natasha Korecki for Politico.

Twitter was not an outlier on social media:

• In 2020, Facebook promised “to remove content with false claims or conspiracy theories that have been flagged by leading global health organizations and local health authorities that could cause harm to people who believe them.”
• YouTube’s then-CEO, Susan Wojcicki, committed to begin “removing information that is problematic. … Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy.”
• Medium vowed to remove posts denying the “effectiveness of social distancing or quarantine for COVID-19, or calls encouraging people to suspend these practices,” or that “masks don’t help prevent the spread of COVID-19” or make it harder to breathe.

WHO Chief Tells Nations: ‘Counter’ Anyone Saying the Agreement Threatens National Sovereignty

Ghebreyesus denounced any claim that “this agreement will undermine a country’s sovereignty by giving power to the World Health Organization (WHO)” as “fake news, lies, conspiracy theories, misinformation and disinformation.” “I strongly urge all countries involved in the pandemic negotiations to actively counter these false narratives,” he said. “There should be no room for confusion or doubt in this matter.” As noted, had he wished to dispel any doubt, he could have removed the sovereignty-destroying provisions from the agreement.

The heart of any government effort to suppress “misinformation” is that the government defines truth and rightly has the power to stifle any other viewpoint. In reality, the evidence rarely bares out the contention that the government knows, or even cares about, truth. Attempts to suppress the free exchange of ideas violate the First Amendment and this nation’s most-cherished principles. Thomas Jefferson best expressed the American ideal when he said, “We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.” Most importantly, censorship vitiates the Christian view that God gave human beings a rational mind capable of understanding and reasoning. The WHO Pandemic Agreement would significantly escalate government censorship, suppression of information, and interference in our right to think and reason together.

No Condemnation of Foreign Nations’ Draconian Anti-COVID policies

Alas, U.S. policies seemed mild compared to foreign nations’ repressive anti-COVID measures:

• China’s “zero COVID” policy saw police weld people inside their apartments, often unable to get food.
• Australia locked up anyone who tested positive or was in close contact with someone who had COVID in camps surrounded by barbed wire.
• Greece forced pensioners over 60 to take the shot or be fined one-sixth of their fixed monthly income.
• Latvia barred unvaccinated lawmakers from voting on laws, even remotely. Yet the defenders of “Our Democracy” uttered not a word.
• Italy restricted “most social activities” to those who had a Super Green Pass, which proved they had taken the shot.
• India’s lockdowns stranded migrant workers with no way to support themselves: “96% of them didn’t receive rations from the government, 70% didn’t receive any cooked aliment and as many as 89% didn’t receive any payment from their employers during the lockdown.” Prime Minister Narendra Modi also targeted journalists and “relied on an army of online trolls who … attack[ed] them in the most personal and vile ways,” write Joel Simon and Robert Mahoney in their book, “The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free.”

The WHO offered only muted criticism of the worst of these policies. Dr. Ghebreyesus called the Chinese Communists’ policy of starvation-by-blowtorch “irresponsible” and “not sustainable.”

More Emergency Vaccines, More Malpractice Lawsuits

Despite the trail of false and misleading government statements about the COVID-19 shot, the WHO Pandemic Agreement clearly forecasts a long future of additional emergency vaccine authorizations — and serious injuries, possibly free from liability. It states, “Each Party shall take steps to ensure that it has the legal, administrative and financial frameworks in place to support emergency regulatory approvals” of “pandemic-related products during a pandemic” (Article 14:5).

It also states nations “shall develop national strategies for managing liability risks … regarding the manufacturing, distribution, administration and use of novel vaccines” (Article 15:1). These may range anywhere from holding the manufacturers responsible to entirely acquitting them of any liability, as was the case for the COVID shot. The potential for corporate price-gouging earned criticism from some on the Left. Public Citizen, a progressive organization founded by consumer advocate Ralph Nader, and which believes the treaty does not grant WHO enough compulsory power over private industries, noted in its written comments that the “U.S. government was a full partner in development of the NIH-Moderna vaccine, yet the absence of contractual access conditions meant Moderna was free to charge high prices from the outset and then quadruple those prices this year, harming the U.S. and global vaccination efforts.”

The accord sets up “no-fault vaccine injury compensation mechanism(s)” to provide a “financial remedy for individuals experiencing serious adverse events resulting from a pandemic vaccine.” Somehow, WHO believes advertising potentially serious adverse reactions will “promot[e] pandemic vaccine acceptance” (Article 15:2).

Censoring Information about ‘Substandard’ Medical Treatments

Despite foreseeing a future of experimental vaccinations harming people worldwide, governments could use the WHO Pandemic Agreement to prevent doctors from exploring or sharing information about alternative treatments. The WHO Pandemic Agreement says nations “shall … strengthen rapid alert systems against substandard and falsified pandemic-related products” (Article 14:3). While the innocuous-sounding provision should encourage governments to thwart health care scams, it could also be used to shut down information about approaches the government does not favor. For instance, the FDA belittled the use of ivermectin, despite an Israeli study stating “ivermectin should be a viable option” and a WHO decision backing clinical trials of ivermectin.

Dr. Mary Nass of Maine had her medical license suspended in January 2022 for dispensing ivermectin to COVID patients. Last December, the Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine extended her suspension through next April 30 and imposed a $10,000 fine. Dr. Nass has since become an outspoken critic of the WHO Pandemic Agreement. “We’re undergoing a soft coup, and the idea is to create a whole new set of laws and ignore the existing human rights laws and others laws under the pretext of pandemic preparedness and the biosecurity agenda,” said Nass. “Embedded in this concept is a peculiar notion that humans are no longer of greater value than animals.”

In fact, with this agreement’s single-minded focus on quotas, some animals are more equal than others.

‘Equity’ Means Quotas and Racial Discrimination in Health Care

The WHO Pandemic Agreement, drafted in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter riots, mentions some variant of the word “equity” 34 times in 30 pages. Vice President Kamala Harris contrasted “equity” with “equality:” To create equal outcomes, nations must treat equal behavior unequally. Equity is the regnant term for government-sanctioned discrimination.

“Equity is at the centre of pandemic prevention, preparedness and response,” the agreement states (Article 3:3).

“States are accountable to provide specific measures to protect persons in vulnerable situations” (Article 3:8) … and all minorities are privileged in health care. The accord stretches the term “persons in vulnerable situations” into an infinitely malleable collection containing everyone allegedly “vulnerab[le] due to discrimination on the basis of race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status” (Article 1i). Rest assured, those suffering discrimination based on “political or other opinion” will not include the Romeike family, a homeschooling family who fled Germany and whom the Biden administration threatened to deport.

The accord requires nations to discriminate against their citizens on the basis of these characteristics. Governments “shall … collaborate to ensure equitable and affordable access to health technologies that promote the strengthening of national health systems and mitigate social inequalities” (Article 11:2d).

The agreement also apparently enacts workforce quotas. Nations must “address gender and youth disparities and inequalities and security concerns within the public health, health and care workforce, particularly in health emergencies, to support the meaningful representation, engagement, participation, empowerment, safety and well-being of all health and care workers, while addressing discrimination, stigma and inequality and eliminating bias, including unequal remuneration, and noting that women still often face significant barriers to reaching leadership and decision-making roles” (Article 7:1b).

Christianity rejects such discrimination against any group. As this author has written, God demands that: “all people stand on level ground at the foot of the Cross and when they approach the bench. Therefore, He decrees one law for all people, irrespective of their ethnicity (Exodus 12:49; Leviticus 19:15; Leviticus 24:22; Numbers 15:16 and 29; and Proverbs 24:23). Uneven weights and measures are an ‘abomination to the Lord’ — the worst abomination is having uneven scales of justice based on race (Proverbs 20:10).”

WHO Pandemic Agreement Demands ‘Gender Diversity’

Equity sees the world based on gender, not sex, and so does WHO’s Pandemic Agreement. The medically accurate term “sex” occurs only once, in its definition of “persons in vulnerable situations.” The agreement states that each nation “shall” make sure clinical trials have “equitable representation, considering racial, ethnic and gender diversity” (Article 9:3b). Having doctors ask patients their gender identity during clinical trials would fulfill a goal of both the Biden administration’s CDC and the transgender movement.

The accord also says workforce quotas should “address gender and youth disparities and inequalities … while addressing discrimination, stigma and inequality and eliminating bias” (Article 7:1b). The ambiguity and fluidity of the word “gender” could allow governments to apply these articles based on transgender identity rather than sex. This should concern Christians at a time when the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal ruled that using gendered language amounts to invidious discrimination, and the nation’s most prestigious newspapers claim “deadnaming” and misgendering “puts trans lives at risk.”

The World Health Organization, led by its Department of Gender, Rights and Equity-Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (GRE-DEI), is in the process of drafting guidelines for so-called “gender-affirming care.” WHO officials will flesh out global guidelines for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transgender surgeries at a meeting from February 19-21.

‘Universal Health Care’

Part of the WHO Pandemic Agreement’s shortcomings is its plea for equity-based socialized medicine. The treaty states that each nation “shall continue to strengthen its health system, including primary health care … taking into account the need for equity and resilience, with a view to the progressive realization of universal health coverage” (Article 6:1). Socialized medicine inevitably leads to mandatory government rationing. The agreement clarifies that “‘universal health coverage’ means that 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” (Article 1k).

The U.K.‘s National Health Service (NHS) fared so poorly at providing its people’s health care needs that the British Red Cross called it “a humanitarian crisis.” That leaves aside concerns such as those posed by Canada’s single-payer health care system, where courts ruled Christian health care providers must refer patients to life-ending “Medical Assistance in Dying.”

The aforementioned WHO guidelines would say abortion and, likely, transgender procedures constitute “essential medical care” during pandemics.

In addition, pharmaceutical companies worry that multiple provisions in the agreement will cut into their profit margins, making it unprofitable to pursue vaccines or other treatments during the next pandemic, stifling innovation and prolonging the crisis.

Republicans Oppose Biden’s Bid to Implement a Treaty without Senate Ratification

As noted, the WHO initially referred to this pandemic agreement as a “treaty,” but Joe Biden asked that its status be changed: A treaty requires Senate ratification, while an agreement can be adopted without Senate consultation. Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) called the ex-treaty “an egregious breach of constitutional principle.”

The substance of the WHO Pandemic Agreement remains the same, whatever its title. That has won the opposition of Republicans in both chambers of Congress:

• Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has introduced the No WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty Without Senate Approval Act.
• Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) introduced the WHO Withdrawal Act (H.R. 79), which would immediately end U.S. membership, repeal the legislation authorizing our WHO membership in 1948, and banning all U.S. funds from WHO projects.
• The American Sovereignty Restoration Act would withdraw the United States from WHO and other international bodies such as the United Nations, and repeal the legislation that first authorized U.S. membership.
• Senator Rick Scott (R-Fla.) introduced a narrower “bill to limit the authority of the World Health Organization on the United States and to oppose amendments to the WHO Constitution that have not been approved by Congress” (4305) in the last Congress.

All those bills were designed to protect the constitutional prerogatives of Congress and pare back executive overreach.

Comment Period Now Open

The Biden administration opened the public comment period just before Christmas, on December 22, 2023. The 30-day comment period closes January 22 at 5 p.m. ET. All U.S. citizens can email their comments, for or against the WHO Pandemic Agreement, to [email protected] with the subject line “Written Comment Re: Implications of Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) Commitments/Regimes and Other Proposed Commitments in the WHO Pandemic Agreement.”

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.