Internationalists Want WHO to Have Power Beyond Mere Guidance

I read John R. Puri’s post urging the U.S. to rejoin the World Health Organization because, 1) it is merely an advisory body and 2), it collects valuable health data. But Puri underplayed the overarching influence WHO exercised on national governments and corporations in enforcing the disastrous Covid-19 policies that caused so much harm, while he also ignored the internationalists’ plan to transform WHO into an organization with actual power to impose policies.

Indeed, before Trump’s election, a treaty was being negotiated, known as the “WHO Convention, Agreement or Other International Instrument on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response” — or WHO CA+, for short — intended to transform WHO from a purely advisory organization into one with regulatory power to enact international public policies. (I warned against the plan at the time.) What policies?

• The WHO director-general would be granted the power to “declare pandemics,” at which point emergency provisions of the treaty to impose public-health policies would go into effect;
• The WHO would be able to dictate policies if international consensus were not obtained by a vote of the two presidents and four vice presidents of the WHO CA+;
• The International Court of Justice would also be granted decisive power;
• If the treaty came into effect, it would centralize pandemic planning and response into WHO;
• WHO would have the power to eviscerate existing intellectual-property rights during a declared health emergency;
• The treaty would also grant WHO centralized control over discourse and debate to prevent “disinformation.”

The lessons here are that WHO cannot be trusted to give dispassionate public health guidance, as demonstrated by its disgraceful response to Covid-19. More to the point, a game is afoot to give WHO actual power in the international sphere.

Realizing that, I urge a hard “no” on the U.S. rejoining WHO until the organization radically changes its current discredited leadership and publicly forswears plans to elevate the organization into a policy formulating and enforcing international power.