WHO Pandemic Treaty and British Sovereignty By Richard Miller (London)
For Aussies concerned about the lack of opposition to the coming world health organization pandemic treaty, there is some good news from the UK jurisdiction. There are now reports that a number of conservative politicians are concerned about the threat that the treaty will have upon British sovereignty. The group is rightfully fearful that the WHO is moving from an advisory position, to a controlling one, which is quite correct. Former Cabinet Minister Esther McVey said: “The plans represent a significant shift for the organization, from a member-led advisory body to a health authority with powers of compulsion,” she continued. “This is particularly worrying when you consider the WHO’s poor track record on providing consistent, clear and scientifically sound advice for managing international disease outbreaks.”
It remains to see if some sort of backlash could develop, along with parallel opposition in the US. It could save the day for Australia.
“Conservative politicians in the United Kingdom have expressed concern over the drafted World Health Organization (WHO) pandemic treaty and the planned amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR).
“Ministers are understood to be alarmed by plans to increase the WHO’s powers enabling its governing body to require countries to hand over the recipe of vaccines, regardless of intellectual property rights, and to counter misinformation,” The Telegraph reports.
A group of Conservative MPs has reportedly written a letter to ministers warning about evident ambition “for the WHO to transition from an advisory organisation to a controlling international authority.”
According to The Telegraph, they urged the UK Foreign Office to stop powers that “appear to intrude materially into the UK’s ability to make its own rules and control its own budgets.”
Andrew Mitchell, a Foreign Office minister, said that he “would block any law that prevents the UK from setting its own health policy,” The Telegraph reports.
“The UK is supportive of the pandemic treaty currently being negotiated by national governments, which could speed up the sharing of data on new pandemic threats so we are able to respond quickly in the event of future pandemics,” Mitchell said. “We’re clear that we would never agree to anything that crosses our points of principle on sovereignty or prevents the UK from taking decisive action against future pandemics.”
The idea of an international pandemic treaty was officially introduced by world leaders in 2021, including the Conservative UK Prime Minister at the time, Boris Johnson.
As currently drafted, the pandemic treaty and the amendments to the IHR would give the WHO binding legal authority to impose “health measures,” including lockdowns and vaccine passports, on all its member states in the case of a pandemic. The IHR amendments also expand the definition of pandemics and health emergencies so that a “potential to impact public health” is enough to justify declaring a global health emergency.
Led by former Cabinet Minister Esther McVey, a group of Conservative MPs have written to Mitchell demanding a Commons vote on the drafted pandemic treaty and the IHR amendments before they are approved and signed.
McVey said that “[t]here is, rightly, growing concern about the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty and International Health Regulations.”
“The plans represent a significant shift for the organization, from a member-led advisory body to a health authority with powers of compulsion,” she continued. “This is particularly worrying when you consider the WHO’s poor track record on providing consistent, clear and scientifically sound advice for managing international disease outbreaks.”
The Telegraph reports that the Conservative MPs were also concerned about the mandate contained in the pandemic treaty to allocate at least 5 percent of the national health budget, plus a certain percentage of a nation’s GDP, to pandemic preparedness and prevention.
Danny Kruger, another signatory of the letter, stated: “Coordination and cooperation in a public health emergency is sensible but ceding control over health budgets and critical decision-making in a pandemic to an unelected international organisation seems profoundly at odds with national autonomy and democratic accountability.”
According to The Telegraph, the MPs also expressed concern about the WHO’s increasing efforts in handling “misinformation,” given that its experts dismissed the theory that COVID originated from the Wuhan virology lab, only to later admit that it is a legitimate possibility.
Molly Kingsley, co-founder of the British campaign group “UsforThem,” said: “We should all be concerned about the WHO being ordained as an arbiter of pandemic truth, especially given its poor record during the pandemic, such as its claim that COVID was definitively zoonotic in origin and its April 2020 denial of the role of natural immunity in protecting against infection.””
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