Despite the failure of the Biden administration to give the World Health Organization (WHO) powers to impose a health emergency on any nation without consent, efforts to empower the WHO through regulatory overreach are continuing, said Alex Newman, an award-winning international journalist.
For Newman, the very significant impact of the amendments, if they are adopted, is that the WHO’s director “would not need the consent of the nation, or the government being targeted, to declare a pandemic or a health emergency of international concern.
“This very clearly is an attack on the national sovereignty of nations and the ability of people to govern themselves,” he said.
According to the U.S. State Department and the WHO, the changes the World Health Assembly did approve were the shortening of the time period for implementing regulatory changes from two years to one year, and the approval of the creation of a new working group to draft and consider new amendments, Newman said.
Those two amendments will be considered first in November and then in the next WHO assembly, Newman continued. “[Mainstream] media presented this as kind of a first step in ultimately achieving the end goal of the Biden administration.”
Newman described the WHO as “incredibly opaque.”
“It is very, very difficult to find out exactly what happened [during the assembly meeting],” Newman said. He sourced the information about the outcome of the last WHO general meeting by directly contacting the U.S. State Department and WHO.
“The fifth priority is to urgently strengthen WHO as the leading and directing authority on global health, at the center of the global health architecture,” he said.
“They want the WHO to have political and financial independence. That’s just another way of saying they don’t want national governments to be able to interfere with what’s going on there.”
According to this plan, the WHO would assume the role of the global health ministry for the entire planet, similar to the role that the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention perform in the United States, Newman explained.
“If everything is a public health crisis and the WHO is the primary mechanism for dealing with health crises, then pretty much everything comes under the jurisdiction of the WHO.”
Opposition to WHO’s Overreach Mounts
The WHO’s meetings are not usually reported on by media, and very few people pay attention to them, yet the proposed amendments have met with significant opposition at the state and federal levels, Newman said.“Multiple lawmakers and legal experts have pointed this out: this stuff is not constitutional. The federal government doesn’t have the authority to run your health care or determine what kind of policies need to be implemented on health care.”
The Constitution enumerates all legislative powers that are reserved for Congress, and health care policies are not among them, Newman said. The federal government does not have these powers themselves, so it cannot delegate those to other parties, be it the WHO or any other body, he added.
“The amendments to the International Health Regulations of the WHO offered by the Biden administration ... will ultimately hand over the United States’ national sovereignty and authority to the WHO and place our democratic nation in the control of an unelected international organization that is wholly unaccountable to the people of this country,” the resolution stated.
The letter also demanded that Biden provide the American people with “total transparency” on the negotiations of the global pandemic treaty and reminded the president that international treaties must be approved by two-thirds of Senate as required by the Constitution.
The measure introduced by Scott also opposes any changes to the WHO charter unless they are enacted by a joint resolution of both houses of Congress.
Proponents of granting the WHO supranational powers over health policies are trying to “move quickly with this agenda before the opposition gains a critical mass,” Newman said.
He advised people who oppose these far-reaching powers to contact their elected state and federal officials and ask them to develop a solution to the WHO’s overreach.