WHO Pandemic Agreement Will Not Be Finished This Year, Officials Say
The World Health Organization (WHO) will not finish negotiating the terms of a wide-ranging agreement that could give globalist bureaucrats sweeping powers during and “between” pandemics.
Despite working on a draft of the WHO Pandemic Agreement since December 2022, the WHO will not complete its text by December, the co-chairs of the WHO’s Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) announced Monday night. “Today, member states agreed we need to conclude the agreement as soon as possible and continue negotiations into 2025 with the goal of concluding the agreement by the next” World Health Assembly, said co-chair Ambassador Anne-Claire Amprou of France.
It is the latest setback for a global pact that could see the United States and other nations transfer vast amounts of money, technological know-how, and national sovereignty to the global governance body, which is led by a former Marxist government official. Officials initially planned to have the agreement finalized last May, then moved the date to later this year before the Biden-Harris administration leaves office.
“As we surmised, they were unable to reach an agreement on the treaty, so they will not have a special meeting this December to vote. Rather, they will keep meeting and negotiating, aiming for the World Health Assembly in May 2025 for a vote,” Reggie Littlejohn, president of the Anti-Globalist International, told The Washington Stand.
WHO officials now hope to adopt the pact’s official text at the 78th World Health Assembly, which begins May 19, 2025.
Global outcry against the pandemic agreement has not caused the negotiating body to reconsider its worst provisions, say critics. For example, “the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing system and all the other controversial provisions remain on the table,” Littlejohn told TWS.
The Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) would act as a global clearinghouse for pathogens, as scientists around the world share biological materials that have the potential to become a pandemic. The current text of the agreement also turns PABS into a global wealth redistribution hub, calling for the ongoing, “timely sharing of benefits, both monetary and non-monetary, free from disruptions of any kind” (Article 12:4a; see also Article 12:3b and 12:5). Its proponents justify these transfers in the name of “equity.” But critics say the PABS system would create a deadlier and more authoritarian global environment.
“If instituted, [PABS] would greatly increase the chances of lab leaks of dangerous pathogens,” Littlejohn noted. “This, in turn, would keep the world in a chronic state of potential pandemics, resulting in great profits for Big Pharma and the constant excuse for bad actors to keep us locked down and deprived of constitutionally protected freedoms, as was the case during COVID.”
The WHO Pandemic Agreement makes WHO provisions binding “during and between pandemics.” Members who adopt the agreement must follow WHO protocols on “routine immunization” and “social measures” including lockdowns, mask mandates, and social distancing. It adopts a controversial “One Health” policy equating the health of human beings with the well-being of plants and animals. And it creates an unelected global government, known as the “Conference of the Parties,” which may change or alter WHO pandemic requirements at any time.
The treaty’s greatest sticking point came from threats to intellectual property rights of Western pharmaceutical companies. Originally, the text required developed nations to transfer 20% of all their vaccines, therapeutics, personal protective equipment, and other pandemic-related goods to the WHO for global redistribution. Recent negotiations mandated that developed nations must give 10% of these materials to the WHO and sell another 10% at nonprofit prices. But Amprou said the developing world still demands “a very strong commitment” from wealthy countries “to have a meaningful percentage allocated to the system.”
Due to the WHO Pandemic Agreement’s global governance structure, Amprou said not all the details about PABS need to be in the agreement itself; they could be added after nations adopt the agreement and it becomes binding on the WHO’s 194 member states. “Should we include everything in the pandemic agreement or in annexes, other instruments, appendices, whatever?” asked Amprou. INB co-chair Precious Matsoso of South Africa agreed that a great deal of work would come about after the agreement’s adoption. “We must have the Conference of Part[ies]” implement “operational elements that can help us,” after the agreement goes into effect, she said.
But with the election of President Donald Trump, the agreement — and U.S. membership in WHO — remain an open question.
“We will be today terminating our relationship with the World Health Organization,” President Donald Trump announced in a Rose Garden press conference on May 29, 2020. Despite his order, “officials continued working toward reforms and to prevent withdrawal,” and “Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar instructed his department to continue cooperating with the organization,” reported ProPublica. But President Joe Biden quickly canceled the agreement upon taking office.
In 2021, WHO officials called for a global pandemic “treaty,” to be legally binding on all signatories. The Biden-Harris administration pressured the organization to change the title from a “treaty” to an “agreement,” as the Constitution requires that a president submit treaties to the U.S. Senate for ratification. Family Research Council has warned the WHO Pandemic Agreement would establish “strangling entities, legal regulatory mandates, and relationships that, when needed, can be switched on to function as a ‘turnkey totalitarian state.’”
When the details of the WHO Pandemic Agreement became known, they triggered global backlash from both sides of the aisle. In May, 24 governors and all 49 sitting Republican U.S. senators signed letters opposing the agreement’s adoption. Trump adviser and former Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said the WHO Pandemic Agreement “should be dead in the water.”
“I will protect American sovereignty from the creeping hands of global government,” Trump told the Libertarian Party National Convention in May. He demanded President Biden submit the agreements to the Senate for ratification as treaties. “If he does not, I will rip them up and throw them out on day one of the Trump administration.” On September 11, the House of Representatives passed the No WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty Without Senate Approval Act (H.R. 1425), but it has stalled in the Democrat-controlled Senate. But last week’s elections will change control of the Senate to the GOP.
With an administration committed to defending national sovereignty, “I would expect that there’s no way that the pandemic accords should get to the finish line, be ratified, or agreed to by the United States, which would really kneecap it, honestly,” said Jennifer Kates, a global health policy specialist at KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation) last Friday.
When asked about the future of the WHO Pandemic Agreement, or the WHO’s most conspicuous member, after President-elect Trump takes office, WHO official Steven Solomon replied, “It is decidedly not the secretary’s role to speculate about the intentions of individual member states.” But advocates and foes of world government say even if the WHO Pandemic Agreement flounders, global governance could assert control over U.S. health care decisions during a pandemic.
“Let’s also not forget that the WHO passed the amendments to the International Health Regulations on June 1, 2024. These amendments are a danger in themselves and give the WHO everything it needs to establish a global totalitarian biotec surveillance state,” Littlejohn told TWS.
Many of the IHRs, adopted at the 77th WHA in May, overlap with provisions of the WHO Pandemic Agreement. So do provisions of the United Nations’ “Pact for the Future,” unveiled in September.
Littlejohn’s organization calls on the United States to make WHO withdrawal part of a larger movement to safeguard national sovereignty from global governance bodies. The U.S. should “resist any mandates coming from the United Nations and all its partners and affiliates, including but not limited to the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum, World Bank, the G-20, the Bank of International Settlements,” and to “repudiate and withdraw from these unelected, unaccountable supranational bodies and networks.”
Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.