- Says UK must be prepared to leave ‘unelected and irresponsible’ WHO
Britain could be forced to accept mandatory lockdowns and vaccines by power-hungry bureaucrats at the World Health Organization, Nigel Farage has warned.
Calls on MPs to reject a “terrifying” WHO treaty that could allow foreign officials to impose major policy decisions on all 194 member states in any future pandemic.
The former Brexit Party leader says the UK must be prepared to leave the “failed, costly, unelected and irresponsible” WHO to stop it “trampling” sovereign countries.
WHO officials will vote on the latest draft of the Pandemic Preparedness Treaty in Geneva next week.
Nigel Farage says he doesn’t trust the World Health Organization and wants it to “stop interfering in people’s lives”
The WHO will vote next week on a new treaty against the pandemic
Describing the WHO as a “very dangerous organisation”, Mr Farage said: “The WHO can be a force for good in the world, but only if it returns to its noble principles and core objectives.”
‘Their role should be to share information and provide guidance, not dictate policy.
‘It must be reformed to respect national sovereignty, stop interfering in people’s lives and abandon the frankly terrifying pandemic treaty.
‘The WHO can no longer ignore the growing dissatisfaction of people around the world. “Either make reforms or countries must abandon it completely.”
He added: “It’s shocking that someone in Geneva we didn’t vote for could force us to close.”
The current draft of the pandemic treaty has been significantly watered down from previous versions.
It would require the UK to hand over a fifth of its vaccines and medicines for redistribution to “countries facing challenges” in a future pandemic, but does not give the WHO the ability to impose vaccine mandates or impose lockdowns.
However, Farage and other critics fear this could be reinstated behind closed doors at a later date, along with other requirements such as higher membership fees.
If signed next week, the treaty could be amended at the annual Conference of the Parties (COP), Farage said, giving the WHO “additional powers and money it needs to build its global public health empire.”
“That’s exactly how the WHO has worked in the past, and that’s exactly why I don’t trust the people who run it today,” he told the Daily Telegraph.
Farage has joined forces with the new international pressure group Action on Global Health (AWH), which wants to reform the WHO.
Its mission is to “take back control” of health policy and hold the WHO accountable for its failures, so that future pandemics can be prevented or addressed more quickly and efficiently.
He says the WHO has repeatedly failed to protect the public. Among other things, he wrongly insisted in January 2020 that there was no human-to-human transmission of Covid-19.
The AWH also wants to cut the WHO’s £5.5bn budget (mostly paid for by the UK, US and EU) and is calling on countries to halve their contributions. He says huge sums of money are currently wasted on luxury travel and thousands of employees.
The Government has insisted it would never hand over authority to the WHO over whether lockdowns should be imposed. But Farage wants Parliament to debate the issue and reserve the right to leave the WHO in a “second Brexit” if necessary.
Republican US senators have also urged President Joe Biden not to sign the pandemic treaty.
They said it would be “unacceptable” to “expand the WHO’s authority over member states” during pandemics, adding that the WHO “caused lasting harm to our country” due to its failures during the pandemic.