FEARS OF FURTHER lockdowns imposed by faceless, foreign officials, Twitter spats with Elon Musk, and conspiracy theories involving UN troops arresting the unvaccinated have all been prompted by a proposed Pandemic Treaty.
Meanwhile, mainstream coverage has been muted, treating the so-called treaty (its official title is the “WHO convention, agreement or other international instrument on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response” or “WHO CA+”), as some vague, broadly well-meaning aspirational agreement that’s more bureaucratic than dramatic.
This is, in part, because many of the loudest voices in these discussions are broadcasting concerns that have nothing to do with the proposed treaty, which is not finalised (nor even definitely a treaty) and whose drafts focus on when disease should be alerted internationally, coordinating research, and sharing vaccines and health products among the world’s poor.
Some of the misleading claims have been fueled by reporting in British and Irish publications, confusing it with a different set of proposals for World Health Organisation (WHO) rules, even though there is little connection with two other than the fact that negotiations for both are occurring at the same time.
Irish Coverage
“It is completely giving away all powers of our sovereign state to the World Health Organisation,” Tipperary TD Matty McGrath said of the Pandemic Treaty, days before the Zero Draft was made publicly available.
“There will be sanctions,” he continued. “That’s what it’s all about: is to control, control and more control.”
An online petition called Act Now To Protect Irish Sovereignty: The Who’s Pandemic Treaty, has amassed about 8,700 signatures at the time of writing.
Meanwhile, government statements on the treaty have been supportive, if somewhat vague, with the Minister for Health telling the Dáil: “Ireland strongly supports a multilateral approach to global health issues with the WHO in a central leadership role.”
International opposition
In the UK, tensions have been noticeably higher, with six conservative MPs writing to the foreign secretary, warning that the treaty is the threat to the UK’s sovereignty and will allow the WHO to impose lockdowns, according to some misleading reporting.
A debate on the treaty, held on GB News later the next day, would be moderated by two of the letter’s signees.
Nigel Farage said joining a pandemic treaty would be akin to the UK joining the EU (which he presumably meant to be a bad thing), while the right-wing Reclaim Party’s one MP described the proposed treaty as “an existential threat” to democracy, as well as being the “absolute opposite” of the Brexit vote (which, again, was presumably meant to be bad).
European representatives have also criticised the proposed treaty, including one Croatian MEP with a history of spreading misinformation who declared “The World Health Organization should be declared a terrorist organization”
Almost all these commentators appear to believe, without any basis in fact, that the treaty puts the WHO in charge of the public health policy of nations that sign up.
Online misinformation
As might have been expected, misinformation about the proposed treaty is rife online, especially on Twitter, where at least the first 50 results returned when The Journal searched for “pandemic treaty” railed against it, with claims that it will give the WHO the right to control the food supply, censor the media, and round up and forcibly vaccinated populations.
Others claims include variations on the theme that 5% of the health budget would be given to “unelected elites including Bill Gates.”
Many of these posts, usually by verified accounts, have hundreds of thousands of views.
The spread of misinformation about the treaty has not been helped by owner of Twitter and living cautionary tale, Elon Musk, who tweeted “Countries should not cede authority to WHO”.
The tweet would be viewed more than 4,200,000 times on Twitter.
The Director-General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, replied to Musk: “Countries aren’t ceding sovereignty to @WHO. The #PandemicAccord won’t change that.
“The accord will help countries better guard against pandemics. It will help us to better protect people regardless of whether they live in countries that are rich or poor.”
So, given the controversy, what is the Pandemic Treaty, and what will it do?
The Pandemic Treaty
While many of the alarmist claims about the Pandemic Treaty are baseless, there isn’t much concrete to say about what the Pandemic Treaty will entail, because it has not been written yet.
And, as may have been implied in the Tweet by Tedros calling it a “#PandemicAccord”, as well as the draft official title (“WHO convention, agreement or other international instrument on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response”), it is not even clear if the so-called Pandemic Treaty will be an actual treaty.
Ongoing negotiations over the potential treaty are part of a series of discussions that began in December 2021, after the deaths and damage caused by COVID-19 demonstrated that more international cooperation would be needed to tackle future pandemics.
The WHO said such a treaty woud “aim to:
However, the WHO’s role is largely administrative — it doesn’t get to decide what the treaty will do, if anything.
So far, this process has involved the creation of panels, draft treaties, and drafts of draft treaties, eventually leading to the publication of the so-called Zero Draft, which is currently being discussed and amended.
(Further drafts featuring more recent amendments have also been published, though these have little official standing).
None of these documents are final or able to be adopted by any countries; they often contain blank sections or trail off with an ellipsis before the sentence ends. The phrase “XX”, designating a word or phrase that has yet to be written appears ten times in the Zero Draft; the phrase “no later than XX” alone appears four times.
The WHO says that, while it has a role supporting member states to negotiate the treaty, it “does not determine the contents of any possible international accord.”
Instead, the treaty is being discussed by the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB).
“The INB Bureau is comprised of six members, selected by, and coming from, WHO’s Member States,” Margaret Harris, a spokesperson for the WHO told The Journal.
“Whatever agreement is reached by Member States working through the INB is to be sent to the World Health Assembly – the annual meeting of where health ministers from WHO’s 194 Member States gather – in May 2024 for adoption.”
Zero Draft
Given that there is no official treaty proposal to speak of, our best indication of what it will contain is the so-called Zero Draft.
So, what does this say? Does it give the WHO massive amounts of power, allowing them enforce lockdowns, order troops to forcibly vaccinate people, or demand that nations give the WHO vast sums of money? In short: no.
The Zero Draft, which is available online, mostly “defines countries’ rights and obligations in handling public health events and emergencies that have the potential to cross borders”, according to the WHO, and includes duties to monitor disease outbreaks and inform the international community about certain health emergencies.
The document is largely made up of some vague guiding principles (including commitments to human rights and national sovereignty), aspirational goals (such as to “strengthen coordination”), and unquantified obligations (such as taking “appropriate measures”).
Many of these appear to contradict the fears made by conspiracy theorists, such as clause 14.2.a , which says restrictions during public health emergencies must be “the least restrictive necessary to protect the health of people”.
The draft’s most concrete proposals are for networks to be established to coordinate and reduce barriers for healthcare product supply as well as allowing pathogen samples and their genetic sequences to be shared between nations.
The draft also proposed that 20% of the benefits from information shared through this network should be provided to the WHO: 10% as a donation and 10% at affordable prices.
Oddly enough, other than this, the organisation of the WHO itself doesn’t feature much in the draft, which is expected to have its own governing body — made up of representatives of the treaty’s signatories.
The document is also very vague on what monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, if any, will be in place to ensure that participating nations actually take heed of the Pandemic Treaty.
Perhaps the most controversial proposal in the treaty asks that at least 5% of each nation’s current health expenditure should be put toward “pandemic prevention, preparedness, response and health systems recovery.”
While another section also says that an as-yet-undecided amount of GDP should be put toward international efforts to counter pandemics, these two clauses have been conflated in some claims that falsely suggest that the treaty “demands every country gives 5% of its health budget to unelected elites including Bill Gates”.
Obviously, it does not; neither Gates nor anyone else is named in the treaty.
More recent working drafts of the proposed treaty have excluded these requirements altogether, which was to be expected — the Zero Draft was explicitly a starting point for nations to begin negotiations on; there is another year of amendments to go.
While we don’t know what the final treaty proposal will look like, there is no basis for claims that it involves a monumental power grab from unelected elites.
Much of the criticism from health experts indicates the opposite, that the treaty will be “watered down” so much that it becomes unable to “prevent another global health disaster”, as one article in the British Medical Journal put it.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say