In particular, this agreement will grant the WHO the power to declare a pandemic, based on its own vaguely defined criteria, in any of its 194 member countries at any point in the future. It will also permit the WHO to unilaterally determine what measures will be imposed in response to these future declared pandemics, including lockdown policies, mandatory masking, social distancing, and coercing the population into undergoing medical treatments and vaccinations.
The Pandemic Treaty has the potential to be extremely detrimental to the future of humanity, because it will allow the WHO’s most powerful contributors to shape universal pandemic measures instead of recognizing the importance of developing specific policies and approaches based on the social, economic, and physical realities and needs of each individual country. The treaty will eliminate the national will and sovereignty of member countries, as it will dictate their health policies based on abstraction, as opposed to considering the realities that prevail in each place.
Even if the Pandemic Treaty genuinely aimed to achieve purely noble humanitarian outcomes, it still has to be opposed on the basis of liberal thought, which maintains that the individual alone must possess absolute responsibility for his own well-being, assuming that he is of mature age and of sound mind. That is to say, the individual is the only one permitted to make decisions that affect his body, his life, and his future, absent the coercive power of any external authority.
However, the Pandemic Treaty will not allow individuals to rely on their own physical, spiritual, and intellectual faculties in order to achieve their own well-being. Instead, it will impose treatments and vaccination on individuals against their own will, thereby violating bodily freedom on a global scale. History is a testament to the fact that violating bodily freedom leads to slavery and retrogression in society.
The Pandemic Treaty will also give the WHO the authority to issue dictates within the private spheres of individuals and to exercise control over their social and public lives, the institutions of their society, and their governments, all in the name of public health. In doing so, it will suppress civil liberties, economic freedom, positive freedom (freedom to), and negative freedom (freedom from). All these forms of freedom are intended to be constructive forces in society that contribute to the achievement of social progress. Once these freedoms are stifled, the foundations of progress and advancement also vanish.
The Pandemic Treaty ignores the fact that, as Joseph Schumpeter noted, there is no “unambiguous standpoint with regard to the social whole, upon general welfare and so forth; nor would such a unitary standpoint exist if all individuals and groups wished to act and evaluate on this basis, since the general good and the social ideal appears differently to each and every one.”[1]
When it comes to medicine, Schumpeter continues, even though people “sufficiently recognize what good health is and generally seek to achieve such a condition,” “it cannot be proved to anyone that health should be positively valued,” as health cannot “be unambiguously defined.”[2] In reality, people pursue “good health with very different levels of commitment, valuing this good in relation to others very differently; nor that their aims are not all exactly the same—the health regimes followed by the boxer and the singer are very clearly not identical.”[3] Even surgeons trained in the same area would not necessarily agree on the same treatment and operation.
For example, writes Schumpeter, “faced with the option of removing an ulcer, or avoiding the damage associated with surgical intervention, two physicians can argue about whether the one or the other would achieve the desired recovery in the same way.”[4] Moreover, within a particular nation-state, “between people of the same political, social, economic, and cultural interest and with the same perspective on the social world there can always be differences over what is worth striving for.”[5] Accordingly, why would any person or organization that purports to support liberal democratic values back the Pandemic Treaty?
Supporters of the Pandemic Treaty should remember the words of John Stuart Mill: “Neither one person, nor any number of persons, is warranted in saying to another human creature of ripe years, that he shall not do with his life for his own benefit what he chooses to do with it. He is the person most interested in his own well-being, the interest which any other person, except in cases of strong personal attachment, can have in it, is trifling, compared with that which he himself has; the interest which society has in him individually (except as to his conduct to others) is fractional, and altogether indirect: while, with respect to his own feelings and circumstances, the most ordinary man or woman has means of knowledge immeasurably surpassing those that can be possessed by any one else.”[6]
That is to say, the individual is in the best position to be the final judge of action when it comes to his bodily autonomy, his private sphere, and his freedom.
