The World Health Organisation is gearing up to persuade the world’s governments to sign a new pandemic treaty in May. Though called an “accord” so as not to frighten us democrats who still like that old-fashioned thing called accountability, it is a significant power grab by this unelected body. Never waste a good crisis, as the saying goes.
Yet the WHO has a terrible track record in managing epidemics, not least in its response to Covid-19, where it made a series of bad mistakes and did China’s bidding. The Pandemic Accord would be a reward for failure.
Last month Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, tweeted plaintively: “There’s a litany of lies and conspiracy theories about the #PandemicAccord. Let me tell you what the accord is about — it’s a set of commitments by countries to strengthen the world’s defences in several areas: prevention with a One Health approach; health and care workforce; research & development; access to vaccines, treatments & tests; sharing of information, technology, & biological samples. What is so problematic about those commitments?”
https://twitter.com/DrTedros/status/1756995691333734559
This sounds lovely but buried within the proposed treaty, and a parallel set of recommended changes to the International Health Regulations, is a grant to the WHO of power to instruct governments on how to manage societies during a pandemic, vesting that power in the director-general.
These undertakings would be legally binding. The G20 leaders stated clearly in Bali in 2022 that the treaty would be a “legally binding instrument” and reiterated in 2023 in New Delhi that they wanted “an ambitious, legally binding WHO convention.”
The amendments to the regulations remove the word “non-binding” and leave little doubt as to who would be in charge:
“States Parties recognize WHO as the guidance and coordinating authority of international public health response during public health Emergency of International Concern and undertake to follow WHO’s recommendations in their international public health response.”
The Swedish government decided against fully locking down society and closing schools in 2020. Would it be allowed to do so next time?
The accord would oblige countries to greatly increase their funding of the WHO in the event of a pandemic to pay for the “containment of spill-over at source” and to hand over products such as of vaccines “in accordance with timetables to be agreed between WHO and manufacturers”.
Under Article 18, countries would also agree to limit criticism of the WHO in order to “combat false, misleading, misinformation or disinformation”. Thus this very article could in theory be censored by our government at the behest of the WHO.
The recent track record of the body to which our government is about to hand such powers and funds does not inspire confidence.
A decade ago, WHO admitted that initially it underplayed the West African Ebola outbreak for fear of offending member states, ignoring the alarm raised by organisations such as Medecins Sans Frontier. It promised to do better next time.
https://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/what-is-who-up-to/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-29668603
But it did worse. On 14 January 2020, at a time when hospitals in Wuhan were seeing a flood of Covid cases, many of whom had never been near animals in a market and some of whom were in turn infecting healthcare workers, the WHO repeated the Chinese government’s nonsensical insistence that you could normally only catch Covid from an animal, not a person: “it is very clear right now that we have no sustained human-to-human transmission.”
The Taiwanese government had by then urged WHO to rethink this dud advice, but the WHO does not even recognise Taiwan’s existence.
A crucial opportunity to nip the pandemic in the bud was lost. A few weeks later, while the Chinese government was punishing medical whistleblowers for telling the truth, Tedros said his admiration for China’s actions went “beyond words”, while praising “China’s commitment to transparency”.
Let us remember that Tedros is an Ethiopian politician who got the WHO job at China’s insistence. The Chinese government had twisted the arms of African countries to vote for Tedros in 2017 while reminding them of potential financial aid from China.
Tedros rewarded Xi Jinping by officially recognising “traditional Chinese medicine” as legitimate science, even though it includes eating pangolin scales which are made of the same stuff as fingernails, encouraging the persecution of these harmless anteaters to the brink of extinction.
Having made these egregious errors in January 2020, the WHO then insisted that it was a “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne”. This turned out to be 100% wrong, based on a 60-year-old misreading of an irrelevant scientific paper, and led directly to telling people to stay indoors when we now know that outdoor infection was very rare. WHO should have been saying “stay outside as much as possible – for meetings, school classes and work”.
But these mistakes pale beside the howler WHO made in 2021. Having taken several months to negotiate terms for a WHO team of scientists to visit China to investigate the origin of the pandemic, it then appointed to the team Dr Peter Daszak, a close collaborator of the Wuhan Institute of Virology who had quietly organised a letter to the Lancet condemning the claim that the virus might have leaked from that laboratory while failing to disclose his own conflict of interest.
Sure enough, after the team reached Wuhan and spent a few days being shown around mostly irrelevant sites, they held a press conference at which they dismissed the lab leak as extremely unlikely and instead endorsed a farcical Chinese government claim that it was far more likely the virus had reached Wuhan on frozen seafood from abroad.
So laughable was this press conference that it backfired and Tedros was forced to concede that a possible laboratory leak should indeed be investigated. He set up a committee to do so, which in the intervening three years has managed to obey a vow of near-Trappist silence on the topic.
https://www.who.int/groups/scientific-advisory-group-on-the-origins-of-novel-pathogens-(sago)
It was left to independent investigators to unearth the evidence that there was indeed a detailed plan to manipulate bat viruses in a laboratory to generate strains that could infect humanised mice – and to do so in Wuhan.
Before Covid, the WHO had been keen to stress the risk of laboratory leaks starting pandemics. In 2006, it said: “A new epidemic of SARS would most likely emerge from an animal reservoir or a laboratory doing research with live cultures of SARS-CoV or handling stored clinical specimens containing SARS-CoV. The risk of re-emergence from a laboratory source is thought to be potentially greater.”
https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/sars-how-a-global-epidemic-was-stopped
Yet the pandemic accord almost completely ignores this risk. If we are to have a draconian treaty imposed on us, then at the very least it should insist that all governments share information about their research on high-risk viruses. Any government that fails to do this should be excluded from scientific collaboration until it complies. The Biological Weapons Convention should do this but it is a toothless waste of time.
At a time when China’s threat to Britain’s security is under scrutiny, we must not allow an unelected body in thrall to the Chinese government to have power to tell our elected government what to do.