Most countries have not initiated any mainstream critical public debate about how Covid-19 was addressed. The governments responsible for the outrageously botched response to the virus have not been held accountable. Communist China, despite having unleashed the virus on the world by deliberately lying about its human-to-human transmissibility, has not suffered a single negative consequence. Nothing has been done either about the duplicitous role played by World Health Organization (WHO), which parroted Chinese Communist Party propaganda about the virus, even after having been informed in writing early on by Taiwan that the virus was highly transmissible.
The WHO, still led by the reportedly corrupt (here and here) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, covered up for China, and repeatedly praised China for, in effect, having murdered more than seven million people worldwide, including more than one million just in the US .
No one has held to account either China's way of handling the virus by recalling protective gear so it would have enough for itself; made billions exporting "useless" defective protective gear (here and here), for sending its citizens abroad to infect the world while it closed down its own borders and tried to isolate Wuhan, where, in a laboratory, the virus seems to have begun. China imposed lockdowns, literally: physically barring 25 million of its own citizens from leaving their apartments. Some who were locked in from outside burned to death in a fire; others, including scientists who tried to warn about the lethality of the virus, or mentioned China's role in spreading the virus, or expressed any skepticism about cures, were either arrested, silenced, or "disappeared".
The same governments and organizations that lied and covered up how Covid-19 was mishandled are now in the process of finalizing negotiations on amendments to WHO's International Health Regulations (IHR) and the new Pandemic Treaty that together will give the WHO Director General unprecedented power over public global health.
At present – at least until the World Health Assembly, the parent organization of the WHO, meets in Geneva from May 27-June 1, the WHO is able to declare a public health emergency of international concern, but now the organization's recommendations are not binding. So far, so good.
The proposed amendments to the IHR, however, give the WHO Director General the authority to declare not just an actual but a potential international public health emergency and set out binding recommendations on how to address it, whether individual states agree with him or not.
This means that the WHO will be able to declare whatever it deems to be an actual or potential health emergency and mandate lockdowns, medical examinations, require vaccination or other prophylaxes, place individuals under public health observation, implement quarantine or other health measures.
In addition, the IHR will adopt the worldwide use of digital vaccine passports. Already in June 2023, the European Union and the WHO announced "a long-term digital partnership to deliver better health for all."
"This partnership will work to technically develop the WHO system with a staged approach to cover additional use cases, which may include, for example, the digitisation of the International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis. Expanding such digital solutions will be essential to deliver better health for citizens across the globe."
The proposed amendment to the IHR, will ensure a "global digital exchange of health information" under WHO.
Worse, no criticism of the new WHO regime and its decisions to declare potential or actual pandemics, lockdowns and treatment, including vaccines, will be allowed under the amended IHR:
"WHO shall collaborate with and promptly assist States Parties, in particular developing countries upon request, in countering the dissemination of false and unreliable information about public health events, preventive and anti-epidemic measures and activities, in the media, social networks and other ways of disseminating such information."
In other words, the government lies, obfuscations and cover-ups that so dominated the last pandemic will become normalized, and all criticism outlawed.
Just last month, Germany woke up to revelations that the country's public health authority had lied about Covid. Newly released documents obtained by investigative journalists after a two-year court battle, showed that Germany's public health authority, also known as the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) advised the German government that the flu posed a greater risk than Covid, masks would be useless, and that lockdowns were more dangerous than the virus and could lead to increased child mortality. None of these concerns were addressed in practice. The German government – as most other governments – instead chose draconian, totalitarian measures inspired by China.
In addition, the RKI's concerns were never communicated to the German public.
Already, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (not a medical doctor) has castigated critics of the planned amendments and new Pandemic Treaty as conspiracy theorists who spread "fake news, lies and conspiracy theories."
The power grab will not only give the corrupt WHO unprecedented powers, but also benefit the special interests who effectively control WHO -- primarily Communist China.
Gebreyesus is a long-time friend of China, which secured the director general's job after Beijing threw its weight behind his candidacy, over the emphatic objections of Ghana and Ethiopia.
Gebreyesus, a former foreign minister and health minister of Ethiopia, who was accused in 2017 of being "fully complicit in the terrible suffering" caused by three cholera epidemics in Sudan and Ethiopia, used his role at the WHO to aid China's global campaign for economic dominance. He even appointed Beijing's ally, Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, as a WHO "goodwill ambassador." Gebreyesus further repaid his debt to Beijing when the Covid-19 pandemic began. He failed to challenge Chinese misinformation about the outbreak, delayed declaring an international emergency, and protected China's economy by discouraging governments from introducing travel controls. "This," the Sunday Times wrote, "allowed the virus to spread across the globe in the crucial early weeks."
The WHO is not elected, has no democratic legitimacy, is not accountable to anyone and has no control mechanisms to restrain its reach. After the horrifying failures of the WHO during Covid-19, the answer is not to give the organization more power, but to disengage from it entirely.
The WHO's illiberal designs to silence all dissent as "disinformation" represent a corruption of both science and freedom of speech – an outcome that is hardly surprising given the outsize influence that China evidently wields on the body and UN member states. Just look at the willingness with which ostensibly liberal Western governments implemented authoritarian measures from the Chinese Communist Party.
Once the new legal instruments are passed, there will be nothing to stop the WHO from making insane decisions based on their corrupted view of science. One such view, totalitarian in its mindset, is that there is one true science, apparently the WHO's, and there can be no discussion of it. "We own the science and we think that the world should know it," Melissa Fleming, Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications at the UN, said at the 2022 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. She also revealed that the social media platforms already "know" that the UN "owns" the science:
"You know, we partnered with Google, for example, if you Google climate change, you will, at the top of your search, get all kinds of UN resources. We started this partnership when we were shocked to see that when we Googled climate change, we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top. So we're becoming much more proactive."
Since the UN claims that to "owns the science," it is now brainwashing the public into believing that "climate change" threatens global health. This view makes it likely that you will one day find yourself in a WHO-mandated lockdown to mitigate the effects of the "climate crisis," along with limits on where you go, how you may get there, what you do, and what you can own.
The US is already seeing forerunners of this in the Biden administration's unconstitutional executive orders, possibly including his attempts to ban internal combustion engine vehicles and gas stoves; mandating dishwashing machines that may need repeated cycles to clean dishes, and new stricter regulations on air conditioners, washing machines, refrigerators, and even leaf-blowers -- and this is only the beginning.
The WHO wrote in a press release on March 22 about its new "toolkit empowering health professionals to tackle climate change":
"Climate change presents one of the most significant global health challenges and is already negatively affecting communities worldwide. Communicating the health risks of climate change and the health benefits of climate solutions is both necessary and helpful...
"Climate change affects health through various pathways, including extreme weather events, air pollution, food insecurity, water scarcity and the spread of infectious diseases. Heatwaves, changing weather patterns and air pollution contribute to a range of adverse health effects, including cardiovascular diseases, respiratory illnesses, mental health issues and malnutrition. Moreover, health systems face increasing strain from climate-related challenges, amplifying the urgency for action...
"By empowering health and care workers to communicate about climate change and health, it aims to drive collective action towards mitigating climate change, building resilience and safeguarding public health."
The UN and the WHO evidently want unlimited control. If they are not stopped right now by national governments that refuse to approve the new Pandemic Treaty and proposed International Health Regulations amendments, unlimited control is what they will have -- and it is we who will have given it to them.
Robert Williams is a researcher based in the United States.
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