Anne Marie Waters
Friday 27th May 2022
It’s not easy to get to the truth about the latest World Health Organisation controversy, and that’s always worrying. The House of Commons library (on May 18th 2022) posted this:
In March 2021, a group 0f world leaders, including UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, announced an initiative for a new treaty on pandemic preparedness and response. This initiative was taken to the World Health Organisation (WHO) and will be negotiated, drafted, and debated in a newly established Intergovernmental Negotiation Body.
It goes on to describe a joint article published in March 2021 which stated that the “main goal of the treaty would be to foster an all of government and all of society approach strengthening national, regional and global capacities and resilience to future pandemics. This includes greatly enhancing international co-operation to improve, for example, alert systems, data-sharing, research and local, regional and global production and distribution of medical and public health counter-measures such as vaccines, medicines, diagnostics and personal protective equipment”.
On the UK’s position, it states:
Prime Minister Boris Johnson was a signatory to the article proposing the treaty initially. The UK’s position on the substance of the treaty remains to be seen.
Public consultations are due to take place in June 2022, and a petition requiring that Boris Johnson not sign the treaty has so far reached almost 150,000 signatures and can be found here.
Why the controversy? Some commentators, particularly in the United States, are suggesting that the treaty will cede sovereignty around health policy to the WHO, and that signatories to the treaty will no longer have control of measures responding to future pandemics. In other words, the WHO will tell the world what to do in the event of a future disease outbreak.
Some would argue that the treaty amounts merely to the formalisation of the status quo. The fact that all countries responded in the same way to COVID already hints at a global rather than national response – and that someone is calling the shots.
Critics of the treaty include Daniel Horowitz, senior editor at The Blaze media company. He claims that the treaty “would essentially allow the director-general of the WHO to declare a public health emergency in a country and unilaterally coerce its citizens to take certain actions”.
Tucker Carlson agrees: “The Biden administration is very close to handing the World Health Organisation power over every aspect, the intimate aspects, of your life. So, imagine the civil liberties abuses that you lived through the COVID lockdowns, but permanent, and administered from a foreign country”.
Laurence Gostin, a global health law professor, said there is no truth to these claims. Gostin states that “the WHO can make recommendations after the declaration of a global emergency, but they are just recommendations and are non-binding”.
The WHO itself also denies the truth of claims by critics that the treaty will end national sovereignty on health policy.
So what is the truth? It’s hard to know, but there is a key point to make.
Of course a national government can refuse to follow recommendations, but will it? It’s unlikely. I say this because national governments don’t tend to do so at the moment. Countries can refuse to go along with the requirements of global bodies as it stands, but they don’t.
National governments, especially Western governments, are expected to agree to the whole globalist world-government development. Political parties or individuals who campaign against such globalisation will have a hard time breaking through, largely because the media is biased in favour of globalism. People who stands on anti-globalist platform will be accused of being conspiracy theorists, or racists, or far-right.
In effect then, it doesn’t matter if there is a treaty or not, because its provisions, even the worst case scenario of loss of national sovereignty in health policy, is already a reality. For any reversal, it will be necessary for nations to elect anti-globalist governments.
We mustn’t give up. Those of us who believe in national sovereignty and democracy must increase our resolve just as the globalist bodies increase theirs.
Anne Marie Waters
Leader
For Britain