Biden Admin Negotiates Deal to Give WHO Authority Over US Pandemic Policies

The Biden administration is preparing to sign up the United States to a “legally binding” accord with the World Health Organization (WHO) that would give this Geneva-based UN subsidiary the authority to dictate America’s policies during a pandemic.

Despite widespread criticism of the WHO’s response to the COVID pandemic, U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra joined with WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in September 2022 to announce “the U.S.-WHO Strategic Dialogue.” Together, they developed a “platform to maximize the longstanding U.S. government-WHO partnership, and to protect and promote the health of all people around the globe, including the American people.”

These discussions and others spawned the “zero draft” (pdf) of a pandemic treaty, published on Feb. 1, which now seeks ratification by all 194 WHO member states. A meeting of the WHO’s Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) is scheduled for Feb. 27 to work out the final terms, which all members will then sign.

Written under the banner of “the world together equitably,” the zero draft grants the WHO the power to declare and manage a global pandemic emergency. Once a health emergency is declared, all signatories, including the United States, would submit to the authority of the WHO regarding treatments, government regulations such as lockdowns and vaccine mandates, global supply chains, and monitoring and surveillance of populations.

“They want to see a centralized, vaccine-and-medication-based response, and a very restrictive response in terms of controlling populations,” David Bell, a public health physician and former WHO staffer specializing in epidemic policy, told The Epoch Times. “They get to decide what is a health emergency, and they are putting in place a surveillance mechanism that will ensure that there are potential emergencies to declare.”

The WHO pandemic treaty is part of a two-track effort, coinciding with an initiative by the World Health Assembly (WHA) to create new global pandemic regulations that would also supersede the laws of member states. The WHA is the rule-making body of the WHO, comprised of representatives from the member states.

“Both [initiatives] are fatally dangerous,” Francis Boyle, professor of international law at Illinois University, told The Epoch Times. “Either one or both would set up a worldwide medical police state under the control of the WHO, and in particular WHO Director-General Tedros. If either one or both of these go through, Tedros or his successor will be able to issue orders that will go all the way down the pipe to your primary care physicians.”

Physician Meryl Nass told The Epoch Times: “If these rules go through as currently drafted, I, as a doctor, will be told what I am allowed to give a patient and what I am prohibited from giving a patient whenever the WHO declares a public health emergency. So they can tell you you’re getting remdesivir, but you can’t have hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin. What they’re also saying is they believe in equity, which means everybody in the world gets vaccinated, whether or not you need it, whether or not you’re already immune.”

Regarding medical treatments, the accord would require member nations to “monitor and regulate against substandard and falsified pandemic-related products.” Based on previous WHO and Biden administration policy, this would likely include forcing populations to take newly-developed vaccines while preventing doctors from prescribing non-vaccine treatments or medicines.

A key question surrounding the accord is whether the Biden administration can bind America to treaties and agreements without the consent of the U.S. Senate, which is required under the Constitution. The zero draft concedes that, per international law, treaties between countries must be ratified by national legislatures, thus respecting the right of their citizens to consent. However, the draft also includes a clause that the accord will go into effect on a “provisional” basis, as soon as it is signed by delegates to the WHO, and therefore it will be legally binding on members without being ratified by legislatures.

“Whoever drafted this clause knew as much about U.S. constitutional law and international law as I did, and deliberately drafted it to circumvent the power of the Senate to give its advice and consent to treaties, to provisionally bring it into force immediately upon signature,” Boyle said. In addition, “the Biden administration will take the position that this is an international executive agreement that the president can conclude of his own accord without approval by Congress, and is binding on the United States of America, including all state and local democratically elected officials, governors, attorney generals and health officials.”

There are several U.S. Supreme Court decisions that may support the Biden administration in this. They include State of Missouri v. Holland, in which the Supreme Court ruled that treaties supersede state laws. Other decisions, such as United States v. Belmont, ruled that executive agreements without Senate consent can be legally binding, with the force of treaties.

There are parallels between the WHO pandemic accord and a recent OECD global tax agreement, which the Biden administration signed on to but which Republicans say has “no path forward” to legislative approval. In the OECD agreement, there are punitive terms built in that allow foreign countries to punish American companies if the deal is not ratified by the United States.

As with the OECD tax agreement, administration officials are attempting to appeal to international organizations to impose policies that have been rejected by America’s voters. Under the U.S. Constitution, health care does not fall under the authority of the federal government; it is the domain of the states. The Biden administration found this to be an unwelcome impediment to its attempts to impose vaccine and mask mandates on Americans, when courts ruled that federal agencies did not have the authority to do so.

“To circumvent that, they went to the WHO, for either the regulations or the treaty, to get around domestic opposition,” Boyle said.

According to the zero draft, signatories would agree to “strengthen the capacity and performance of national regulatory authorities and increase the harmonization of regulatory requirements at the international and regional level.” They will also implement a “whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach at the national level” that will include national governments, local governments, and private companies.

The zero draft stated that this new accord is necessary because of “the catastrophic failure of the international community in showing solidarity and equity in response to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.”

A report from the WHO’s Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (pdf) characterized the WHO’s performance as a “toxic cocktail” of bad decisions. Co-chair Ellen Johnson Sirleaf told the BBC it was due to “a myriad of failures, gaps and delays.” The solutions proposed by that report, however, did not suggest more local autonomy or diversified decision-making, but rather greater centralization, more power, and more money for the WHO.

The WHO pandemic agreement calls for member states to implement “One Health surveillance.” One Health is a concept that has been embraced by the UN, the CDC, the World Bank, and other global organizations.

“The term originally meant a way of seeing human and animal health as linked—they sometimes are—so that you could improve human health by acting more broadly,” Bell said. “It has become hijacked and now is used to claim that all human activities, and all issues within the biosphere, affect health, and are therefore within Public Health’s remit. So public health can be deemed to include climate, or racism, or fisheries management, and this is being used to claim that addressing carbon emissions is a health issue and therefore a health ‘emergency.’”

The WHO zero draft states that “‘One Health surveillance’ means …,” leaving the definition to be worked out in future drafts. Whatever One Health surveillance ultimately entails, however, the signatories must invest in it, implement it, and “strengthen” it. In September 2022, the World Bank approved a Financial Intermediary Fund (FIF) to finance, among other things, One Health surveillance.

Signatories also agree to support the official narrative when it comes to information about a pandemic. Specifically, they will “conduct regular social listening and analysis to identify the prevalence and profiles of misinformation” and “design communications and messaging strategies for the public to counteract misinformation, disinformation and false news, thereby strengthening public trust.”

This aligns with efforts by the Biden administration to, as former White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki put it, “make sure social media companies are aware of the latest narratives dangerous to public health … and engage with them to better understand the enforcement of social media platform policies.” Or as UN Undersecretary-General Melissa Fleming stated at a 2022 World Economic Forum panel on “Tackling Disinformation” in Davos, “We own the science and we think that the world should know it.”

The official narrative during the COVID pandemic included support for lockdowns, school closures, and masking—all of which have since proven to be ineffective in stopping the spread of the virus and damaging to public health. A group of more than 900,000 doctors, epidemiologists, and public health scientists jointly signed the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, expressing “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies.” This declaration was widely derided as dangerous misinformation and was censored on social media.

“The views that they crushed were orthodox public health,” Bell said. Up until 2019, public health guidelines “specifically said that things like prolonged border closures, closing stores, etc. were harmful, particularly for low-income people, and shouldn’t be done beyond a few weeks.”

Those who pushed for lockdowns “were very clear that what they were recommending for COVID was going to be extremely harmful, and that the harm would outweigh the benefit,” Bell said. “They were clear because they wrote that down before, and there’s nothing new in the idea that impoverishing people reduces life expectancy. Something dramatically changed their minds, and that something wasn’t evidence, so we can only assume that it was pressure from vested interests.”

In January, a survey presented at the World Economic Forum found that public trust in government has plummeted since the start of the pandemic, though attendees were at a loss to explain the reasons for the decline in trust. Instead, the discussion at the panel, titled “Disrupting Distrust,” focused on combating rogue news sources that challenged the central narrative.

In July 2020, then-President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from membership in the WHO. Citing the WHO’s dismal performance in responding to the COVID pandemic and its ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Trump said that U.S. funding of approximately half a billion dollars per year would also cease.

In response, then-presidential-candidate Joe Biden vowed: “On my first day as President, I will rejoin the WHO and restore our leadership on the world stage.” Biden kept his promise and took it one step further, negotiating the pandemic accord.

Today, GOP lawmakers are attempting to revive the effort to take the United States out of the WHO. On Jan. 12, House Republicans introduced the “No Taxpayer Funding for the World Health Organization Act,” which was sponsored by 16 representatives.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), lead sponsor of the bill, stated: “Funneling millions of taxpayer dollars to the corrupt World Health Organization that serves the Chinese Communist Party is a slap in the face to hardworking American families struggling under record high inflation, and to all those whose lives and livelihoods were ruined and destroyed by the COVID pandemic. The WHO … praised China for their ‘leadership’ at the beginning of COVID-19 and has done nothing to hold the CCP accountable for the spread of COVID-19.”

The pandemic accord, a spokesman for Roy told The Epoch Times, “is just another reason to defund the WHO.” Redefining Sovereignty and Human Rights

The zero draft of the accord states that national sovereignty remains a priority, but within limits. “States have, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the principles of international law, the sovereign right to determine and manage their approach to pubic health,” the draft declares, “provided that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to their peoples and other countries.”

The accord states that human rights are also important, and it mandates that “people living under any restrictions on the freedom of movement, such as quarantines and isolations, have sufficient access to medication, health services and other necessities and rights.” The accord presents human rights as “health equity, through resolute action on social, environmental, cultural, political and economic determinants of health.”

In line with this concept, countries like Austria went so far as to criminalize the refusal to take the COVID vaccine. Within the United States, places like New York City mandated vaccine passports for access to public spaces, dividing its residents into a privileged vaccinated class and a second-tier unvaccinated class.

However, others see human rights not in terms of collective health but rather as individual rights, to include such things as personal sovereignty, the ability of individuals to make their own choices, the right of people to have a voice in medical decisions that affect them, free speech, and freedom of movement and assembly.

Following the Second World War and the state-control ideologies of fascism, national socialism, and communism, “it was realized that there has to be a fundamental understanding that individuals are sovereign” Bell said. Human rights declarations after the war emphasized that, even during times of crisis, “we are born with rights, we’re all equal, and those rights are inviolable. That is being very much watered down or wiped away in order to do this.”

“I think this issue is much, much broader; it’s what sort of society we want to live in. Do we believe in equality or do we believe in a feudal system where we have a few people at the top, controlling society, telling others what to do? That’s the direction we’re going in.”

The WHO, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, and the World Bank were contacted regarding this article but did not provide a response.

Thank you for referencing that article lightman.

"Biden Admin Negotiates Deal to Give WHO Authority Over US Pandemic Policies"

FR: Never Accept the Premise of Your Opponent’s Argument

Why aren't "MAGA" House majority "Republicans" screaming about the following major constitutional problem with WHO dictating government-manufactured pandemic policy for US citizens?

Since the states have never expressly constitutionally given the post-17th Amendment ratification feds the specific power to dictate policy for INTRAstate healthcare, not even try to stop the spread of contageous diseases, the misguided Roberts Court wrong about unconstitutional Obamacare imo, POTUS and Senate cannot use federal treaty fower to force US citizens to comply with WHO pandemic policy.

"10th Amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
"Many are the exercises of power reserved to the States wherein a uniformity of proceeding would be advantageous to all. Such are quarantines, health laws [emphasis added], regulations of the press, banking institutions, training militia, etc., etc." —Thomas Jefferson to James Sullivan, 1807.
"Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States." —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
"They form a portion of that immense mass of legislation, which embrace every thing in the territory of a state not surrendered to the general government. Inspection laws, quarantine laws, and health laws [emphasis added], as well as laws for regulating the internal commerce of a state, and others, which respect roads, fences, &c. are component parts of state legislation, resulting from the residuary powers of state sovereignty. No direct power over these is given to congress, and consequently they remain subject to state legislation, though they may be controlled by congress, when they interfere with their acknowledged powers." —Justice Joseph Story, Article I, Section 10, Clause 2, 1833.
“Inspection laws, quarantine laws, health laws of every description [emphasis added], as well as laws for regulating the internal commerce of a state and those which respect turnpike roads, ferries, &c., are component parts of this mass.” —Justice Barbour, New York v. Miln., 1837.
"From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added]." —United States v. Butler, 1936.

Below are excerpts from Supreme Court case opinions and congressional record that don't mention quarantine, but support the constitutional reality that healthcare issues, politically correct (imo) mandating of masks argued to slow spread of contagious diseases for example, is a state power issue, not the business of the feds.

”State inspection laws, health laws, and laws for regulating the internal commerce of a State, and those which respect turnpike roads, ferries, &c. are not within the power granted to Congress [emphases added]” —Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
From the congressional record, clarification by Rep. John Bingham, the main author of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment:
”Simply this, that the care of the property, the liberty, and the life of the citizen, under the solemn sanction of an oath imposed by your Constitution, is in the States and not in the federal government [emphases added]. I have sought to effect no change in that respect in the Constitution of the country.” —John Bingham, Congressional. Globe. 1866, page 1292 (see top half of third column)
“Direct control of medical practice in the states is obviously beyond the power of Congress [emphases added].” –Linder v. United States, 1925.

Patriots are also reminded that Congress cannot use its power to make treaties as a back door to expanding its constitutionally limited powers to make US citizens comply with foreign laws.

From related thread...

Consider that Thomas Jefferson had used his uncommon common sense as Secretary of State, then later his experience as president of the Senate, to point out that federal government power to make treaties cannot be used as backdoor to bypass the Constitution's Article V process for giving new powers to the fedreal government.

“In giving to the President and Senate a power to make treaties, the Constitution meant only to authorize them to carry into effect, by way of treaty, any powers they might constitutionally exercise.” —Thomas Jefferson: The Anas, 1793.
“Surely the President and Senate cannot do by treaty what the whole government is interdicted from doing in any way.” — Thomas Jefferson: Parliamentary Manual, 1812 .

The Supreme Court later reflected Jefferson's words with the following clarification concerning the Executive and Senate abusing their power to make and confirm treaties respectively.

"The obvious and decisive answer to this, of course, is that no agreement with a foreign nation can confer power on the Congress, or on any other branch of Government, which is free from the restraints of the Constitution." —Reid v. Covert, 1957.

Patriots, the bottom line is this imo. What is your threshold of “pain” for peacefully stopping unconstitutionally big state and federal governments controlled by bully, constitutionally undefined political parties, from oppressing the people under their boots?

The inevitable remedy for ongoing, post-17A ratification, corrupt political party treason (imo)...

All MAGA patriots need to wake up their RINO federal and state lawmakers by making the following clear to them.

If they don’t publicly support either a resolution, or a Constitutional Convention, to effectively "secede" ALL the states from the unconstitutionally big federal government by amending the Constitution to repeal the 16th (direct taxes) and 17th (popular voting for federal senators) Amendments (16&17A), doing so before the primary elections in 2024, that YOU will primary them.

If the proposed amendment was limited strictly to repealing 16&17A, relatively little or ideally no discussion would be needed before ratification of the amendment imo.

With 16&17A out of the way, my hope is that Trump 47 becomes the FIRST president of a truly constitutionally limited power federal government.

In the meanwhile, I'm not holding my breath for significant MAGA legislation to appear in the first 100 days of new term for what may still prove to be another RINO-controlled House.

Trump will hopefully do another round of primarying RINOs for 2024 elections.

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