Senate won't force Biden to bring WHO Pandemic Treaty to vote
Senator Ron Johnson has posted a video of his attempt to get his fellow senators to pass a law requiring Senate ratification for any pandemic agreement with the UN's World Health Organization (WHO). Although Johnson has already obtained 45 co-sponsors, the senator attempted to get the bill quickly passed by means of an amendment to a different bill that was already close to being passed. While the attempt failed, Johnson claimed a victory of sorts in that it forced his opponents to go on record as failing to protect the independence of the nation.
Now we know Democrats are willing to relinquish U.S. sovereignty to a global entity. How sad.
Why now?
Article II of the Constitution lays out the role of the Senate in approving treaties.
The President . . . shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur;
It would seem safe then to simply wait for the White House to present the WHO treaty to the Senate for a two-thirds vote. But Joe Biden knows he does not have 67 senators prepared to approve the treaty. Senator Johnson explained, in his speech supporting the amendment, that he's acting now in an attempt to block Biden from adopting the treaty without ever presenting to the Senate for a vote.
Unfortunately, there are indications that the Biden Administration is considering joining this new convention by executive agreement and avoiding the Senate. We should not let this happen. An agreement of such magnitude needs to be submitted to the Senate for advice and consent. This is not a partisan issue. This is about reclaiming the Senate's prerogatives on international agreements.
Signing away freedom
Despite Biden's stance that the WHO "agreement" is not a treaty, it creates a significant transfer of power from nation states to the WHO as Johnson told his colleagues.
[The WHO's] pandemic prevention and preparedness [treaty] would give the World Health Organization broad new powers in managing future pandemics. If accepted, it would cement the World Health Organization at the center of a global system for managing future pandemics, and it would erode U.S. sovereignty.
Turning to specifics, Johnson listed areas in which US sovereignty would be subverted.
- [I]t would require a substantial new financial -U.S. financial commitment- to an international body without proportional voting power.
- It would require the U.S. to give the World Health Organization 20% of vaccines and other pandemic-related products produced for future pandemics.
- It includes a heavy emphasis on the transfer of intellectual property rights to the World Health Organization . . .
- It also promotes a global one health approach to health care, including harmonizing regulation under WHO guidance.
WHO above First Amendment
Johnson added what may be the most grave infringement of US sovereignty, a suspension of the right that the Framers chose to place first in the Bill of Rights — freedom of speech.
It gives the World Health Organization a leading role in fighting misinformation and disinformation. And as the Twitter Files reveal, that leads to censorship and the suppression and abridging of freedom of speech.
The Twitter Files referred to by Johnson involved censorship by American political leaders, through their influence on Big Tech. Those politicians can be voted out of office by American citizens. Citizens do not get to vote for WHO officials, though, further increasing the difficulty in fighting censorship that would be directed by unelected overseas bureaucrats if the pandemic treaty were to be adopted by the US.
Even worse?
Some analysts have detailed further the WHO's Pandemic Treaty to provide for even more egregious encroachments on liberty. Simon Goddek, PhD (Biotechnology), for example, who has over 300,000 followers on Twitter, posted this list of endangered freedoms.
The [treaty] will grant the WHO immense control over critical aspects of our lives, including defining the next pandemic, determining lockdowns, giving themselves surveillance power, dictating treatments, imposing vaccine mandates, and even redistributing resources. [Emphasis added].
Goddek notes that the WHO even brought climate change and 15-minute cities into the treaty.
The doc also encourages policies such as 15-minute cities, climate change lockdowns, and the seizure of farms from farmers.
While the current version of the WHO's Pandemic Preparedness Treaty does not mention 15-minute cities, it does require nations to act against alleged climate change which it declares, as a matter of fact, to be a “driver” of disease.
The Parties will identify and integrate into relevant pandemic prevention and preparedness plans
interventions that address the drivers of the emergence and re-emergence of disease at the human-
animal-environment interface, including but not limited to climate change, land use change, wildlife
trade, desertification and antimicrobial resistance . . .
The Parties commit to strengthen synergies with other existing relevant instruments that address
the drivers of pandemics, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation and increased
risks at the human-animal-environment interface due to human activities. [Emphases added].
WHO's in charge?
Johnson went on to note how the WHO in particular should not be trusted with these powers, though he omitted the charges laid out in a recent speech by an Australian senator who railed against the head of the WHO for his terrorist background and for keeping 83 rapists and molesters on staff since they attacked women and children who were not recipients of WHO services and therefore didn’t violate WHO’s sexual exploitation practice policies. Instead, Johnson focused on the WHO's failures in its COVID response.
The WHO has not earned this power. Far from it. At a critical moment in late 2019 and early 2020, the WHO utterly failed to detect the emerging COVID-19 pandemic and delayed informing its member states. Instead, it was kowtowing to Beijing.
See our previous articles outlining resistance in the US and UK to the WHO's plan to diminish the sovereignty of nation states:
