The history of the failed WHO pandemic treaty is best described as ‘if you first don’t succeed, try and try again’.
“We are not where we hoped we would be when we started this process,” said Roland Driece, co-chair of WHO’s negotiating board, the INB, on 24 May 2024.
WHO had hoped to present a final draft treaty to health ministers at the next World Health Assembly in Geneva next week.
“This is not a failure,” lied WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in Geneva after the talks ended, about the WHO’s failure to produce a draft pandemic treaty.
Reasons for the lack of government support vary.
“Some US Republican senators protested to the Biden administration that the draft treaty contained ‘intellectual property rights’ issues. And Britain said it would agree to the treaty only if ‘adhered to British national interest and sovereignty’”, the AP reported.
VOA News
The first group formed to prepare the way for a worldwide pandemic treaty was The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (IPPR), a small panel of 13 members co-chaired by our very own, the Rt Hon Helen Clark, and Her Excellency Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, former President of Liberia.
The IPPR was formed in September 2020, churning out “peer reviewed” reports justifying the need for a global pandemic treaty. IPPR briefing guidelines claimed:
- critical failings at each step of the COVID-19 response from preparedness to detection and alert and to the early and sustained response…
- too few countries responded adequately to the declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on 30 January 2020…
- the most effective responses to date were those which established effective multi-sectoral co-ordination reporting to the highest level of government…
- internationally, it took too much time to establish effective co-ordination between health and economic support measures, and to ensure that other sectors, including trade and intellectual property regulation, shared a common vision…
Their recommendations to WHO were to “overcome the twin challenges of ensuring that pandemic threat is elevated to the highest leadership level” and “pandemic preparedness and response are treated as a whole-of-government and whole-of-society responsibility…”
The IPPR advised WHO to strengthen the “authority and independence of WHO” and “establish a Global Health Threats Council funded over 10-15 years with contributions of $5-10B per annum based on a country’s ability-to pay formula”.
Well, they got away with extracting money from wealthy Western countries to fund the fake war on global warming/climate change, so why not do it again under threat of a future global pandemic?
The IPPR hasn’t met since May 2021 when they presented their final report to the WHO “COVID-19: Make it the Last Pandemic” and handed over the baton for a global pandemic agreement to a group which first met in March 2021.
Twenty-five heads of government and international agencies met to signal the need for work on “a new international treaty for pandemic preparedness and response to build a more robust global health architecture that will protect future generations…”
The treaty “would be rooted in the constitution of the World Health Organization, drawing in other relevant organizations key to this endeavour, in support of the principle of health for all. Existing global health instruments, especially the International Health Regulations, would underpin such a treaty, ensuring a firm and tested foundation on which we can build and improve.”
Hardly indicative of worldwide acceptance, the commentary was signed by:
“J. V. Bainimarama, Prime Minister of Fiji; Prayut Chan-o-cha, Prime Minister of Thailand; António Luís Santos da Costa, Prime Minister of Portugal; Mario Draghi, Prime Minister of Italy; Klaus Iohannis, President of Romania; Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda; Uhuru Kenyatta, President of Kenya; Emmanuel Macron, President of France; Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany; Charles Michel, President of the European Council; Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Prime Minister of Greece; Moon Jae-in, President of the Republic of Korea; Sebastián Piñera, President of Chile; Andrej Plenkovic, Prime Minister of Croatia; Carlos Alvarado Quesada, President of Costa Rica; Edi Rama, Prime Minister of Albania; Cyril Ramaphosa, President of South Africa; Keith Rowley, Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago; Mark Rutte, Prime Minister of the Netherlands; Kais Saied, President of Tunisia; Macky Sall, President of Senegal; Pedro Sánchez, Prime Minister of Spain; Erna Solberg, Prime Minister of Norway; Aleksandar Vucic, President of Serbia; Joko Widodo, President of Indonesia; Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine; Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization.”
This group of 25 made absolutely no headway and in December 2021 the WHO established the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) representing all WHO members “to draft and negotiate a convention, agreement or other international instrument under the Constitution of the World Health Organization to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response (hereafter referred to as the WHO CA+).”
The failure to produce said global pandemic treaty hasn’t deterred the WHO at all, seemingly unperturbed by a lack of consensus among WHO members about their differences in handling Covid and how this hampers an agreement for specific strategies around a future pandemic; or by the wealth of information becoming available about what worked during Covid and what didn’t.
Tedros described the immense disparity between rich and poor countries concerning access to vaccines and other necessities “a catastrophic moral failure.”
VOA News
Tedros fixating on vaccinated immunity will be music to the ears of pharmaceutical companies but the kiss of death for vaccinated recipients who experienced adverse reactions and repeated infection.
And then there’s the WHO’s lack of consideration that natural immunity is regarded as superior to vaccinated immunity when supported by the use of cheap and effective products to treat infection.
Proportionally, African countries had fewer deaths from COVID-19 than wealthier countries with better access to vaccines and viral inhibitors.
WHO has said that the number of new cases is currently doubling every five days, the fastest rate this year. Although “the speed of the spread is fast, deaths remain low and even dropped by 19 per cent last week compared with the previous week”, the UN health agency reported.
UN News Dec 2021
Africa represents 12.5 percent of the global population, but it accounted for just 4 percent of the 3.4 million deaths that had been reported around the world as of May 18 [2021]
Northeastern Global News June 2021
WHO had warned that the unavailability of the Covid vaccine in African countries would mean increased deaths, but the opposite occurred.
By the end of July 2022, officially 102 000 people in South Africa had died of Covid-19. However, the number of excess deaths was estimated at about 300 000 (Madhi,2022). South Africa’s relatively low number of Covid-19 deaths compared to those of countries in the Global North, could possibly also be attributed to its young population: more than 70% of South Africans are younger than forty (Cloete & Rajaratnam, 2020). Internationally, it has been found that older people were more at risk of dying from Covid-19.
ILO Feb 2023
“The inequity faced by the African continent was high, with only 2.4% of the people having been vaccinated compared to 41% of the North American population and 38% of the European population in 2021.”
Wiley Online Library
The WHO can keep telling individual nations how to behave in a future health emergency, but countries will make up their own minds on the basis of their own Covid experiences and the growing amount of information on the ineffectiveness of the WHO’s Covid strategies, including vaccination.
