WHO Pandemic Agreement Would ‘Affirmatively Harm the U.S.’: Congressional COVID Report
Although the Biden-Harris administration has promoted global governance as a panacea to prevent future pandemics, a congressional report has concluded that the World Health Organization (WHO) Pandemic Agreement would not only do nothing to prevent future pandemics but would “affirmatively hurt” public health by giving more credence to the statements of the dissembling and incompetent body.
A special session of the WHO’s World Health Assembly in November 2021 agreed “to establish … an intergovernmental negotiating body … to draft and negotiate a WHO convention, agreement or other international instrument on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.” Originally presented as a binding international treaty, WHO changed its title to a pandemic “agreement,” reportedly at the insistence of the Biden-Harris administration, which realized the controversial document could never receive Senate ratification.
“While a new pandemic, prevention, preparedness, and response treaty seems like a good idea in theory, on paper it falls short,” finds the granular, 520-page final report from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, released on Monday.
The World Health Organization’s performance during the COVID-19 outbreak should argue against granting it more power, the report concludes.
WHO did nothing as the People’s Republic of China violated numerous existing WHO rules, known as International Health Regulations (IHR), the report noted. China violated Article 6 of the IHR, which says that “[e]ach State Party shall notify WHO … within 24 hours … of all events which may constitute a public health emergency of international concern,” the report states. The CCP also broke Article 7 of the IHR, which mandates that if a “State Party has evidence of an unexpected or unusual public health event … it shall provide to WHO all relevant public health information.”
“The Pandemic Treaty does not address the weaknesses of the IHR. The WHO’s refusal to hold the CCP accountable for violating the IHR is a major issue in protecting global public health,” it notes.
“The WHO’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic was an abject failure,” states the report. “During the pandemic, the WHO repeatedly relied on false information from the CCP,” the Chinese Communist Party. The report details that WHO officials ignored warnings from Taiwan about the virus in late December 2019. WHO tweeted, “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China”
“These ‘preliminary investigations’ in actuality included the CCP jailing any doctor that disseminated any information about COVID-19 that was not first cleared through state-run media,” the report notes.
The director-general of WHO, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of Ethiopia, “even went so far as to praise the CCP’s ‘transparency’ during the crisis, when, in fact, the regime consistently lied to the world by underreporting China’s actual infection and death statistics.” Although China did not report the deadly outbreak promptly, Ghebreyesus falsely claimed WHO received its first report of COVID-19 “from Wuhan, from China itself.” By covering up the CCP’s deception, “the WHO made an affirmative decision to shield the CCP from accountability.”
The CCP exercised veto power over the inclusion of U.S. scientists in the WHO’s formal investigation and exerted “complete control over every single aspect of the investigation team’s itinerary and access to information.”
Talks to create the new WHO Pandemic Agreement have been similarly marred by opaque conditions, the report says. “Throughout the ongoing negotiations, there have been questions about the transparency of the negotiations. There have been multiple closed-door negotiations resulting in large edits that are then presented to all Member-States,” say its congressional authors. “Some of the more contested and debated provisions include financing for pandemic preparedness and response, pathogen access and benefit sharing, intellectual property rights, technology transfer, and research and development for pandemic-related products.”
“Further, it is not clear if this treaty will be ratified through the U.S. Senate or not. If the U.S. determines to enact a Pandemic Treaty, it must go through the required Senate approval process,” says the report.
“The World Health Organization’s Draft ‘Pandemic Treaty’ Does Not Solve the Organization’s Underlying Problems and May Affirmatively Harm the United States,” the report concludes.
The WHO announced last month that it would not conclude WHO Pandemic Agreement negotiations this year, as anticipated. Family Research Council has warned the terms of the WHO Pandemic Agreement create “a web of freedom-strangling entities, legal regulatory mandates, and relationships” that can be “switched on to function as a ‘turnkey totalitarian state.’”
The U.S. has donated $3.6 billion to WHO between 2014 and 2023.
Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.