The WHO's Pandemic Power Grab

Despite a temporary setback at the recent meeting of the World Health Organization in Geneva, the Biden administration wants to give the WHO unilateral authority to declare public health emergencies in the United States regardless of the wishes of the American public.

During his administration, president Donald Trump reduced U.S. funding of WHO and gave notice the U.S. would withdraw from the organization, but Joe Biden, who apparently is fine with gutting American sovereignty, is enamored of it. Biden wants to strengthen the WHO and increase its power in world affairs by changing the language of an international pandemic treaty to promote the so-called Great Reset, which would dissolve national borders and empower radical super-elitists like Klaus Schwab.

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The push to surrender America’s control over its own destiny to an unaccountable, Sinophilic U.N. agency that lied repeatedly about Covid-19 and its origin came as negotiators gathered last week to decide the fate of the world at two globalist conferences in Switzerland.

The first  was at the plutocratic World Economic Forum in Davos, and the second, more relevant to this story, was a few hours’ drive away at the U.N.’s 75th World Health Assembly in Geneva. Against this idyllic alpine backdrop, monkeypox has conveniently appeared on the media’s radar, providing fodder for endless fits of pandemic paranoia as the Wuhan flu fades away.

One-worlders will be disappointed to learn that Biden’s betrayal of American interests will have to wait because he experienced a setback when thirteen proposed amendments to the treaty were unexpectedly rejected. Despite support from Australia, the U.K., and the E.U., countries such as Brazil, Brunei, India, and Russia reportedly weren’t onboard with the amendments and that was enough for the process to grind to a halt. The meeting wrapped up May 28.

The package of amendments the U.S. pushed in Geneva would “give WHO the right to take important steps to collaborate with other nations and other organizations worldwide to deal with any nation’s alleged health crisis, even against its stated wishes,” according to Peter Breggin, a psychiatrist by training, a former U.S. Public Health Service officer, and former National Institute on Mental Health consultant. He writes:

The power to declare health emergencies is a potential tool to shame, intimidate, and dominate nations. It can be used to justify ostracism and economic or financial actions against the targeted nation by other nations aligned with WHO or who wish to harm and control the accused nation.

The WHO, for example, pushed the disastrous COVID-19 lockdowns, even managing to use them to promote "global warming" pseudoscience. “Countries must set ambitious national climate commitments if they are to sustain a healthy and green recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic,” the organization claimed in October 2021, adding that “air pollution, primarily the result of burning fossil fuels, which also drives climate change, causes 13 deaths per minute worldwide.” There's more:

The IHR [International Health Regulations] would be a legally binding agreement among 196 countries –including the U.S.— that provides “a framework for coordinating the international response to events that may constitute a public health emergency of international concern.” According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the treaty specifically requires countries to have the ability to: “make sure surveillance systems and laboratories can detect potential threats”; “work together with other countries to make decisions in public health emergencies”; “report specific diseases, plus any potential international public health emergencies, through participation in a network of National Focal Points”; and “respond to public health events.”

The CDC adds the treaty also “includes specific measures countries can take at ports, airports and ground crossings to limit the spread of health risks to neighboring countries, and to prevent unwarranted travel and trade restrictions.”

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Biden’s draft amendments to the treaty would bestow on newly re-elected highly radicalized WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus the power to declare a public health emergency in any country on earth. Among the amendments, one would remove a current requirement that the WHO “consult with and seek to obtain verification” from officials in a country where a health crisis is suspected before issuing any public declarations. Another provision would require WHO to create “early warning criteria for assessing and progressively updating the national, regional, or global risk posed by an event of unknown causes or sources.”

Yet another would require the WHO, when faced with a country with a suspected problem, to take action if the country doesn’t cooperate with it within 48 hours. The WHO would be allowed “when justified by the magnitude of the public health risk, [to] immediately share with other [nations] the information available to it.”

The Epoch Times reported last month that the proposed amendments echo a White House fact sheet from February indicating the U.S. “will continue to advance health security and pandemic preparedness abroad, including through strengthening WHO, working with partners towards targeted IHR amendments.” The Biden administration supports “global threat detection innovations through a globally connected network of public health surveillance systems that optimizes disease prevention and health promotion as we strengthen surveillance initiatives to provide necessary actionable data before, during, and after a pandemic.”

Leftists are patient , however, and Biden will no doubt try again to promote his amendments or push his internationalist agenda in another way so it’s worth looking at what he tried to do. Biden still has plenty of time to bribe foreign leaders with foreign aid and other goodies to win their support. His WHO defeat is likely only temporary.

The Global Pandemic Treaty: A Diabolical Plan

As should be common knowledge by this time, the Covid-19 pandemic was a godsend for the political Left. It allowed democratic governments to bypass Charters and Constitutions guaranteeing freedom of speech, worship, assembly and mobility, and to assert authoritarian control over their citizens—all under the cloak of protecting people from future outbreaks of pestilence.

A key player in what is nothing less than a paradigm shift from democracy to despotism among the nations of the West, the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) is proposing and, indeed, engaged in enacting a Global Pandemic Treaty intended to coordinate emergency response to whatever pandemic may lurk on the horizon. New Omicron strains, Bird Flu, Monkeypox and hemorrhagic smallpox are only the latest pathogenic candidates, and more are sure to come. The plan envisions total political control over medical initiatives, censorship of “disinformation,” restrictions on travel, discretionary imposition of lockdowns and masking, and the issuing of digital vaccination certificates, in effect forming an Orwellian Ministry of Health whose arbitrary authority will dictate how governments are to act and react whenever a threat to public health is declared.

"We must not allow memories of this crisis to fade and go back to business as usual."

But there is more to the scheme than at first appears. It comprises nothing less than an existential peril to the sovereignty of nations and constitutes the central plank in the Globalist platform associated with the so-called Great Reset, namely, the dismantling of national borders in the interests of a putative New World Order with its capital at Davos, to be overseen by the plutocratic Left. The plan has been in operation for some considerable time: the deliberate absorption of millions of immigrants, refugees and economic migrants from third-world countries, as if the host nations were essentially borderless, and now, in the U.S., the intentional opening of the Southern Gate to additional millions of fugitive hordes of “asylum seekers.”

This contemporary species of Volkswanderung, vast caravans of invasive supplicants and interlopers permitted willing entry into the homeland, represents only the physical aspect of the operation. As we see, it is now complemented by a proposed legislative apparatus ensuring the dissolution of  the concept and practice of Westphalian statehood and its replacement by a presumptive one-world government dominated by a global cabal of wealthy oligarchs and administered by an immense organization of unaccountable bureaucrats.

As Dr. Peter Breggin writes, “This threat is contained in new amendments to W.H.O.’s International Health Regulations, proposed by the Biden administration [that] will empower WHO’s Director-General to declare health emergencies or crises in any nation… The same threat looms over all the U.N.’s 193 member nations.” These regulations and amendments are a “binding instrument of international law [that will] strengthen WHO’s ability to unilaterally intervene into the affairs of nations merely suspected of having a health emergency.” The notion of borders circumscribing a coherent and independent political entity will have been “cancelled.”

As to be expected, the plot thickens. Chinese exile Dr. Li-Meng Yan claims on Two Mikes that the bogey of "climate change" is also in the mix. Climate change will be held responsible for pandemics to come, as well as for food shortages and many other critical issues, giving the World Health Organization and its affiliates increased control over national policy. The Pandemic Treaty, as noted, is the vestibule to promoting the objectives of the Great Reset, hinging on the pretexts of pestilence and climate, as even the language in which the strategy is formulated makes clear: “the World Health Assembly also requested the W.H.O. Director-General to… facilitate the participation of other United Nations system bodies, non-state actors, and other relevant stakeholders in the process to the extent decided by the INB” (Intergovernmental Negotiating Body).

The operative term is “stakeholders,” World Economic Forum (W.E.F.) Chairman Klaus Schwab’s lynchpin phrase elaborated in minute detail in his recent Stakeholder Capitalism, advancing a scenario of governance predicated on disempowering democratic structures and provisions and establishing a collective of unelected “stakeholders”—private/public enterprises, major corporations, technological/political partnerships—in their place. “And they have real-world implications,” writes Ivan Wecke in openDemocracy, “for the way our food systems are organized, how big tech is governed and how our vaccines and medicines are distributed.” Wecke concludes with a warning: “If you value your right to public health, to privacy, to access healthy food or to democratic representation, be wary of the words ‘stakeholder capitalism’ when they pop up at the next Davos summit.”

Moreover, when one considers the principal proponents and organizers of the takeover, the Ethiopian communist and CCP sympathizer Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus—just re-elected to a second five-year term— and the W.E.F.’s ineffable Klaus Schwab with visions of autocratic grandeur, along with world leaders who have adopted the real-time conspiracy, the sequel is much to be feared.

"No one is safe until everyone is safe."

In short, the Global Pandemic Treaty espoused by the W.H.O. in alliance with the W.E.F. is intended as the means by which national borders will be demolished and nations will eventually disappear on the world stage, representative democracy will become a short-lived historical experiment, and a privileged managerial class of elite “stakeholders” will assume the reins of power, realizing the totalitarian dream of the political Left. 

At any rate, that’s the plan, a viral contagion if ever there was one.

Some Non-Negotiable Demands for Utopia

Just when you’ve started wondering what topic you should write a column about—an activity that mostly leads to hours of more wondering—a lightning bolt strikes and clarifies your duty. On this occasion the lightning bolt took the friendly form of a left-wing petition urging me to save the world, more or less, by signing a petition making certain demands on . . . well . . . the world.

It’s easy to mock such things, and I shall try to do once or twice here, but the idea of petitioning parliaments, congresses, and governments is an ancient, honorable, and essentially democratic one. As a mode of debate it’s greatly to be preferred to hitting the heads of people with whom you disagree with mallets. And it has sometimes brought about peaceful democratic change—notably in the case of the People’s Charter of 1838 which brought millions onto the streets, made the ruling classes nervous, and persuaded Parliament to introduce most of the essentials of the country’s modern democracy over time.

The petition sent to me was somewhat more ambitious. It was addressed flatteringly to “policy makers” and it bore the grandiose title Covid-19 Global Solidarity Manifesto. It is well-designed, having that look of authentic simplicity that disarms skepticism, and it is indeed short, simple and declarative. Its nine main points begin with the words, “We demand . . .”

Or else.

What’s being demanded we’ll come onto in due course, but the petition varies its demands with assurances that these things are going to happen anyway. Oh yes. This kind of writing is known as the “imperative indicative,” but it’s less imperative than they might wish because the element of threat is so understated. Reading it is rather like being held up by a man wearing a Covid-19 health mask and wielding a banana.

Let’s now come to the content—the weak spot here as in so many left-wing manifestos. The first demand is for “strong, universal health care systems and health care as a basic right for all humans.” Such things would certainly be desirable outcomes, but they cannot be granted as rights because they are unattainable in present circumstances and would impose insupportable burdens on everyone everywhere including those countries which currently have good health systems.

Consider this: even in progressive health care systems in rich countries there’s a constant irresolvable struggle to combine three things: universal access, the full range of (ever-expanding) medical treatments, and cost control. Pick any two. The attempt to have all three results in regular crises in which queues for particular treatments lengthen and expensive treatments cease to be available at all.

That discomfiting reality rests on the truth that the demand for health care is potentially infinite. As the former UK health minister, Enoch Powell, wrote in a 1960s book (I quote from memory): Unrestrained by price, the demand for health care rises until it consumes the entire national income. When I quoted that to a distinguished doctor of firmly liberal views on the faculty of Stanford University, he told me that he hated to agree but that he was reluctantly bound to do so.

The end result of Demand #1, therefore, would be the universalization of health poverty as the fruit of an attempt to equalize health care upwards. So Demand #2—a massive reduction in war, conflict, and defense spending—would fail as well since half of its purpose is to pay for Demand #1 and some of the other causes listed (“housing, childcare, nutrition, education, Internet access, and other social needs.”)

There is only one way the world could afford to pay for this catalogue of costly benefits and that is if we were able to achieve a fantasy of high economic growth without end. Unfortunately, that prospect is scotched by Demand #3 which calls for “the fantasy of endless growth” in unsustainable capitalist economies, “[to] be replaced with cooperatively based economies of care, where human life, biodiversity, and our natural resources are conserved and a universal basic income is guaranteed so that governments can work together to combat the existential threat of climate change.”

And here we come to the nub or gist of the problem. In a way, the petitioners are pointing to something important which they misunderstand: endless growth under capitalism is not a fantasy but the experience of capitalism over more than two hundred years. Such growth has proved to be a fantasy, however, under all other economic systems, notably those “cooperatively based economies of care” which provide their citizens with economic security, but which also restrict them to much lower living standards than their capitalist neighbors. Such economies have delivered economic wastelands despite being given a series of Western loans and investments over the years.

Moreover, the various kinds of communist/socialist economies in the last century that attempted a (more realistic) version of this program did not handicap themselves by swearing off cheap fossil-fuel based energy as the main mover of industrialization and prosperity. Quite the contrary. Lenin defined communism as “Soviet power plus electrification,” and unlike some modern environmentalists, he didn’t think that electricity grew on trees (not without the trees being chopped down, converted to wood chips and then transported thousands of miles to power stations across the world.)

But the signatories of the Covid-19 Global Manifesto want to deliver all the benefits above, including a program of universal income grants, without using cheap fossil fuel energy that underpins prosperity worldwide. Their “fantasies” of electrification provided entirely from renewables like wind and sun were recently diagnosed into oblivion by Professor Michael Kelly of Cambridge University in his monograph Electrifying the UK, in which he cites, with examples, the costs of engineering the delivery of energy—even in the cases where its generation is relatively cheap. They turn out to be enormously expensive.

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For instance:

It is often pointed out that electric motors are more efficient than internal combustion engines, and this is true; there is a factor of three involved. But the low energy density of batteries means that much of this advantage is lost in having to carry around a heavy battery. The power pack for a Tesla weighs half a tonne and occupies much of the floor pan of the car: for the same 600-km range in a petrol car, you would need 48 litres of petrol, weighing just 36 kg.

And:

The £45 million battery installed by Elon Musk outside Adelaide, South Australia, can power that city for 30 minutes. It would power the emergency wards (20% of total demand) of Addenbrooke‘s Hospital in Cambridge for 24 hours on a single 80–20% discharge. Back-up is currently provided by two 1500- kVA diesel generators, which run for as long as fuel is available and cost £250,000. So if you wanted to be able to cover a 3 week’s power outage after a major storm, it would cost around 1300 times as much using batteries as it would with diesel generators.

I'm not over-confident that you can simply multiply that cost by the number of hours in a day and days in a year to get an accurate estimate of what it would cost to power Adelaide for a year, but if so, the cost would be upwards of a trillion dollars. And there are similar mind-boggling cost overruns attached to almost every Green technical insight. I doubt Adelaide’s city fathers would think that a practicable proposition. Nor would the government of South Australia, nor the Australian federal government in Canberra. Nor other governments not headed, however temporarily, by visionary idealists.

That may not matter a great deal to the authors of the Global Solidarity Manifesto.  Consider the organizations that so far have signed up to the manifesto. Here was the list as of yesterday:

My guess is that unlike the  Chartists of 1838, these bodies are looking to present their reforms to organizations representing the whole of mankind rather than to narrow nationalist democratic governments that have to pay for their policies by taxing their citizens and justifying expenditures to the voters in elections. Insofar as they seek to change the policies of national governments, they do so by  influencing UN and other globalist bodies which then lean on governments to follow them in ways that Hudson Institute scholar John Fonte has called a fantasia of “global governance.”

In other words, it’s the stage army of transnational progressives mounting another membership drive. They have little or no genuine  democratic credentials, and they frequently proclaim that their favored concerns are "too important to be left to democracy—which is all the more reason for the rest of us to apply democratic criteria to their manifestos.

There are about nine billion people in the world. Yesterday the Covid-19 Global Solidarity Manifesto had 1600 signatures. When the figure reaches five billion, call my office.

A Tale of Two Emergencies

For the last few years the peoples of the Western world have been repeatedly warned in the most frightening terms that they are facing a vast climate “emergency,” but they’ve had the greatest difficulty in keeping their eyes open when the emergency was explained to them. Worse than that, when their eyes have been opened forcibly by election campaigns, they have generally voted to reject the solution—namely, carbon taxation—proposed to them by their governments. And where there’s been a realistic choice, they’ve often rejected the governments too.

In response to this climate skepticism, Greta Thunberg, the anti-establishment protesters of Extinction Rebellion, and the woke Left have joined governments in ramping up the pressure on ordinary citizens to support extreme solutions (see below) to climate change because if we don’t, the world will end in twelve years. Even so the main public response to the protests—disrupting city centres, glueing themselves to roads, and blocking pipelines and mines—taken by the activists and tacitly supported by the authorities has been public anger and demands that they protesters be restrained and prosecuted.

It’s almost as if most of the public don’t really believe there’s a climate emergency.

Now, it’s certainly not because the public doesn’t believe in emergencies in general, or in taking them lightly when they occur, or in shrugging their shoulders and letting governments get on with coping with them. All that has become panic-shriekingly clear in the last two weeks as the Coronavirus emergency has burst into the public mind and provoked supermarket rioting across the world.  So it’s worth looking at the two emergencies and what the differences between them tell us about the politics of emergency in the wider context.

The first and most obvious difference is that whereas governments struggle to make the people care about climate change, it’s the ordinary people who are demanding faster action, more effective medical responses, and bolder intervention by governments, even limits to civil liberties, to halt the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus. The former emergency has been one in which governments put pressure on the people, usually to little or no avail; the latter is one in which the people pressure the governments, sometimes having an impact either in policy or on national life.

Of course, the reason for this is not mysterious. There really is an emergency over Covid-19 (to give the virus its full official title): people are contracting the illness almost everywhere, dying in large numbers in some countries, and the numbers of both infections and deaths are increasingly daily. The Johns Hopkins Tracking Map keeps an up-to-the-minute score which currently shows 136,929 infected people and 5058 deaths worldwide. China, Italy, and Iran have suffered the most of both so far, but other countries are catching up. Europe looks like it's replacing East Asia as the worst hit region. People everywhere feel that the virus may soon come to a street near them. And as Dr. Johnson might have said, the prospect of catching a potentially fatal illness concentrates the mind wonderfully. 

That’s led in turn to a second difference: attitudes to the experts and their advice.  On climate change, experts have been elevated to a position of near-omniscience. Those who dispute the orthodox “consensus” of climate scientists, including skeptics who are themselves climate scientists, are labelled “climate deniers,” and media outlets such as the BBC and the Guardian either exclude them from the discussion or attach a “health warning” to their contributions. Debate is discouraged. Only one version of scientific truth is regarded as respectable, even though the underlying basis of science is that truth is always provisional. Something is true until it's displaced by another truth, usually one that can be demonstrated by experiment.

In the coronavirus debate, however, public concern over the imminent risks to them have led to a more skeptical attitude. Experts and the governments they advise have come under severe criticism for not seeing the warning signs of the epidemic—now classed by the World Health Organization as a pandemic—early enough and for not advising sufficiently strong measures to contain it when they realized it was happening. They cite reasons for the first failure: the Chinese government, with the World Health Organization turning a blind eye, kept the seriousness of the coronavirus outbreak under wraps and allowed it to spread beneath the radars of most other nations.

The second failure—if it is one—is more complicated, and we probably won’t know the full truth about it until after the pandemic is over. There's a broad division of opinion between the experts on how to deal with a pandemic once it’s no longer “contained.” The expert view adopted by most countries (and which also sounds like commonsense to most people) is that you should pursue an active policy of “social distancing:" encouraging individual citizens to self-isolate, and banning large gatherings, closing cinemas, restaurants, and most shops, and restricting passage over borders. That will hinder the spread of the virus, even if it can't prevent it.

The other expert view, exhibited most clearly in UK policy, is that these measures won’t really work but instead will mean that mass infections are likely to "peak" all together at a particular time and to overwhelm health services when they do. We see something like that in Italy today. The UK view is that it’s better for infections to be stretched out over a time so that hospitals can cope with the several smaller “peaks” as they occur in succession. This delaying effect will also push the spread of the virus into the summer months when it’s less dangerous and a vaccine is more likely to have been developed.

Now, I don’t know which of those two theories is correct. But I do know that the UK version has been developed by expert professionals over many years of studying earlier epidemics. It wasn’t dreamed up by Dominic Cummings over lunch in Whitehall.  Other experts in the UK disagree, however, and want a more aggressive shutdown and a tougher approach to social isolation. And, understandably, they have a lot of support from a worried public.

I don't intend to decide between these two expert views. The course of the coronavirus pandemic will eventually do that. But I do conclude that when an emergency is real, experts will likely differ on how to deal with it, and the public will want to hear the arguments of both sides fairly thrashed out. If the climate emergency ever becomes real in the public mind, then the scientific consensus won’t last long. People will want answers to a lot of questions, and both climate scientists and economists who question the prevailing orthodoxy will be given a hearing.

Many other differences between these two emergencies illuminate how policy-making inevitably changes when it ceases to be theoretical and becomes a matter of hard choices. One of the important but rarely emphasized elements in the 2018 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on mitigating global warming is that it will incorporate a massive re-distribution of resources from the West to the developing world, including China. Well, a sacrifice is easy to endorse when it’s many debates away from implementation. But the hostility to China over its Chernobyl-like censorship of the rise and spread of the virus suggests that most Western countries—Trudeau's Canada perhaps excepted—won't be too keen on transferring their resources to a great power that sometimes seems to be a hostile one. Nor will they be happy to do so under the auspices of the kind of international civil servants who in WHO allowed Beijing to keep the epidemic under very non-transparent wraps. And even without these recent incentives to national self-interest, governments will be much more nervous about sending out more public money abroad when the voters are paying the kind of attention to climate policy they now give to the pandemic.

So the best question about the most important difference between the two emergencies was posed—though he thought he was answering it—by the former Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, when he tweeted as follows about the coronavirus crisis:

A silver lining: Climate activists have been told again & again that people will never consent to major changes in their lifestyle. Well, Covid-19 changed all that! Once the epidemic ends, we must demonstrate that a better, green, post-capitalist lifestyle can be fun!

Good luck with that, as the saying goes. For it glosses over some very important distinctions--or perhaps I should call them inconvenient truths.  

Have people really consented to major changes in their lifestyle in the Covid-19 crisis? Sure, they’ve been prepared to accept some voluntary social isolation and to impose isolation on their reluctant neighbors because they want to be safe. And living is not a trivial part of any lifestyle. But the restrictions they accept or demand are strictly temporary. It has needed a deathly threat to persuade them to go as far as that. And the experts advising the UK government don’t think social distancing and self-isolation, either voluntary or enforced, will be fun either. In fact the reason they propose a policy depending much less on that approach is that they think people will get tired of it quite soon, after about a month, start breaking their semi-quarantine and reverse its earlier gains.

Those modest sacrifices, however, don’t begin to compare with the massive impoverishment that would follow the proposals of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to keep the rise in world temperature to 1.5 degrees between now and 2050. This would require a massive reduction in carbon emissions in the West’s economies, which in turn that would mean far higher prices of the energy that powers every aspect of our lives and working lives -- industry, agriculture, transport, communications, travel, and the kind of homes we can afford to live in. Governments have assented to this—it's an intergovernmental organization, after all—but it’s doubtful if even senior ministers have grasped what it would mean for their economies, let alone their voters.

And the IPCC report does not exactly spell it out. Advocates of Green politics and net-zero emissions policy rarely go into detail on it. And the IPCC's 2018 executive summary—turgid and verbose though it is compared to the clarity of the UK medical experts—devotes very little space to the proposed economic shutdown and none at all to what it would cost. As it writes sotto voce: “The literature on total mitigation costs of 1.5°C mitigation pathways is limited and was not assessed in this Report.”  

And that impoverished lifestyle is not for one or two months. It’s a forever thing.  If I had a more suspicious nature, I’d think Varoufakis was proposing this in revenge for what the EU, the IMF, and then ECB did to Greece.

But if not: Have fun, Yanis.