The World Health Organization is preparing to persuade world governments to sign a new pandemic treaty in May.
Although it’s called a “deal” so as not to scare Democrats who still like that old-fashioned thing called accountability, it’s a major power grab by an unelected body that now seems determined to set rules for how they should how countries react to future pandemics. Never waste a good crisis, as the saying goes.
However, the WHO has a terrible record in managing epidemics, especially in its response to Covid-19, where it made a series of serious mistakes and did China’s bidding. The Pandemic Agreement would be a reward for failure.
Last month, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, tweeted plaintively: “There is a litany of lies and conspiracy theories about the #PandemicAgreement.”
‘Let me tell you what the agreement is about: it is a set of commitments by countries to strengthen the world’s defenses in several areas: prevention with a One Health approach; health and care personnel; Investigation and development; access to vaccines, treatments and tests; exchange of information, technology and biological samples. What is problematic about these commitments?
Tedros Adhanom, director general of the World Health Organization, (left) shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2020
The WHO has a terrible record in managing epidemics, especially in its response to Covid.
This sounds lovely. But hidden in the proposed treaty, and in a parallel set of recommended changes to the International Health Regulations, the WHO is given the power to instruct governments on how to manage societies during a pandemic, giving that power to the director general.
These commitments would be “legally binding”, as G20 leaders declared in Bali in 2022 and in New Delhi in 2023.
The suggested amendment leaves little doubt as to who would be in charge: ‘States. . . Recognize WHO as the guiding and coordinating authority for the international public health response during a public health emergency of international concern and commit to following WHO recommendations in its international public health response.
What would this mean for the Swedish government, which decided not to completely lock down society and close schools, avoiding the devastating economic consequences of the lockdown without suffering excess deaths worse than other countries? Could I do it next time?
The agreement would require countries to significantly increase WHO funding in the event of a pandemic, pay for “containment of contagion at source” and deliver products such as vaccines “in accordance with schedules to be agreed between the parties.” WHO and manufacturers. Would Britain, under such restrictions, be allowed to roll out its vaccine program with the remarkable efficiency it did from 2021?
Countries would also agree to limit criticism of the WHO to “combat false, misleading, erroneous or disinformed information.” In theory, this same article could be censored by our government at the behest of the WHO.
The recent record of the body to which our government is about to hand over such powers and funds does not inspire confidence.
A decade ago, the WHO admitted that it initially downplayed the Ebola outbreak in West Africa for fear of offending member states, ignoring alarm raised by organizations such as Doctors Without Borders. He promised to do better next time. But it was worse.
On January 14, 2020, as Wuhan hospitals were suffering an avalanche of Covid cases, many of which had never been around animals in a market and some of which, in turn, were infecting factory workers health, the WHO repeated the Chinese government’s meaningless insistence. that you can normally only get Covid from an animal, not a person: “Right now it is very clear that we do not have sustained transmission from person to person.”
In January 2020, the WHO insisted it was a ‘FACT: #COVID19 is NOT transmitted through the air’ (file image)
By then, the Taiwanese government had urged the WHO to reconsider this failed advice, but the WHO does not even recognize Taiwan’s existence.
A crucial opportunity to nip the pandemic in the bud was lost. A few weeks later, as the Chinese government punished medical whistleblowers for telling the truth, WHO chief Tedros said his admiration for China’s actions went “beyond words,” while praising ” China’s commitment to transparency.
Tedros is an Ethiopian politician who got the WHO job at China’s insistence. The Chinese government twisted the arm of African countries to vote for Tedros in 2017, while reminding them of possible financial aid.
He rewarded Xi Jinping by officially recognizing “traditional Chinese medicine” as legitimate science, even though it includes eating pangolin scales, encouraging the persecution of the harmless anteaters almost to extinction.
After making these egregious mistakes in January 2020, the WHO insisted it was a “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT transmitted through the air.” This turned out to be 100 percent wrong and led to people staying indoors (crowded and unventilated), when we now know that outdoor infection was very rare. The WHO should have said “stay outside as much as possible, for meetings, school classes and work.”
But these mistakes pale next to the howl the WHO made in 2021.
Having taken months to negotiate terms for a team of WHO scientists to visit China to investigate the origins of the pandemic, he appointed Dr. Peter Daszak to the team.
He was a close associate of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and had quietly organized a letter to the Lancet at the beginning of the pandemic condemning the claim that the virus could have leaked from that laboratory, without disclosing his own conflict of interest.
Before Covid, the WHO had wanted to highlight the risk of laboratory leaks triggering pandemics.
After the team arrived in Wuhan and spent days looking at mostly irrelevant sites, they held a press conference in which they dismissed the lab leak as extremely unlikely and endorsed a ridiculous claim by the Chinese government that it was much more likely than the virus would have arrived in Wuhan through frozen seafood. from abroad.
This was so ridiculous that it backfired and Tedros had to admit that a possible lab leak needed to be investigated.
He created a committee to do so, which in the three years since has managed to obey an almost Trappist vow of silence on the issue.
It was left to independent researchers to uncover evidence that there was indeed a detailed plan to manipulate bat viruses in a laboratory to generate strains that could infect humanized mice, and to do so in Wuhan.
Before Covid, the WHO had wanted to emphasize the risk of laboratory leaks triggering pandemics. In 2006, it said: “A new SARS epidemic will most likely arise from an animal reservoir or from a laboratory conducting research with live cultures of SARS-CoV or handling stored clinical samples containing SARS-CoV.” The risk of re-emergence from a laboratory source is believed to be potentially higher.’
However, the Pandemic Agreement almost completely ignores this risk. If a draconian treaty is going to be imposed on us, it should at least insist that all governments share information about their research on high-risk viruses. Any government that fails to do so should be excluded from scientific collaboration until it complies.
At a time when China’s threat to Britain’s security is under scrutiny, it would be, frankly, crazy to give an unelected body in thrall to the Chinese government the power to tell our elected government what to do.
- Matt Ridley is a former Conservative colleague and co-author of Viral: The Search For The Origin Of Covid-19.