World Health Assembly Cites Need to ‘Restrict Personal Liberties’ and Expand WHO’s Emergency Powers

Guest Post by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D.

The World Health Organization this week concluded its 76th World Health Assembly without ratifying a new pandemic treaty or the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations, but members did issue new calls to “restrict personal liberties” during health emergencies.

The World Health Organization (WHO) this week concluded its 76th World Health Assembly (WHA) without ratifying a new pandemic treaty or the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR).

However, the meetings, held May 21-30 in Geneva, Switzerland, did include announcements about new WHO bodies created to respond to pandemic threats and new calls to “restrict personal liberties” during health emergencies.

The meetings also included circulation of the new “bureau’s text” of the pandemic treaty, dated May 22, but the WHA did not make available an updated document for the proposed IHR amendments.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged member states to reach an agreement on both instruments by 2024.

Independent journalist James Roguski, who has extensively tracked the pandemic treaty and IHR amendment negotiations, described this year’s WHA as “a big theatrical production.”

“You can focus on a million details and forget that what they are doing is negotiating these documents,” Roguski told The Defender. “It’s a dog and pony show.”

Roguski said it was always the WHO’s plan not to ratify the treaty and amendments during the WHA meetings, despite warnings to the contrary by some analysts whom he accused of “fearmongering.” It was “always their schedule … they’ve been saying all along they’re shooting for 2024,” he said.

New pandemic treaty ‘dystopian in its scope and its cleverness’

The “bureau’s text” of the pandemic treaty was revealed for the first time at the WHA. At 42 pages, it is shorter than previous drafts that exceeded 200 pages and appears to have consolidated many previous proposals submitted by the negotiating parties.

In a recent video produced by Roguski, he described the new text as “good news, as it seems the WHO has finally revealed its true plan” — but also, “bad news, as it is absolutely dystopian in its scope and its cleverness.”

According to the Geneva Health Files, member states will discuss the bureau’s text in early June and in mid-June will take up a drafting group process. It remains unclear if this will “form the basis of any negotiation.”

Speaking last week on CHD.TV’s “Friday Roundtable,” Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist, biological warfare epidemiologist and member of Children’s Health Defense scientific advisory committee, said the WHO is now calling the pandemic treaty and IHR amendments “instruments,” perhaps “because treaty sounds like it has to be ratified by the Senate, and they’re trying to find a way around that.”

On the same broadcast, Nass and Roguski said the new IHR amendments are “a completely new document.” Writing on Substack, Roguski questioned why “an updated version of the 307 proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations” was not made available.

Roguski told The Defender:

“They really didn’t talk very much. I can’t find any version 2.0 of an edited version of the negotiations that have been going on. They have not published anything. And so, the amendments that were submitted in September were kept secret until mid-December, and that is still the only version that we have.”

In his analysis of the bureau’s text, Roguski noted that article 33 appears to provide countries with “no way to opt out of adopted protocols,” even if they voted against a particular amendment.

He also cited Article 22, which calls for the formation of an “Implementation and Compliance Committee” to “review compliance with” the text. The Biden administration has shown support for the creation of this committee, while reaffirming support for the pandemic treaty and IHR amendments.

In January, The Lancet called for a similar monitoring system.

Roguski pointed out that the bureau’s text also contains proposals for the recognition of the One Health approach (Article 5), removing conditions on public funding of Big Pharma research and development (Article 9), and a variety of definitions for concepts that include “pathogen with pandemic potential” and “infodemic” (Article 1).

The text also proposes the creation of a new and separate “Conference of the Parties” (COP) that, according to Roguski, “would be empowered to adopt ‘protocols’ in the future without Congressional oversight.”

In his video, Roguski said:

“This bureaucratic conference of the parties would also include representatives of the United Nations and their specialized and related agencies, as well as representatives of any body or organization, governmental or non-governmental, private sector or public sector that could apply to be a member of the conference of parties.

“The work of the conference of parties would be carried out by three committees and a panel of experts [Articles 23-25] to provide scientific advice and would be empowered to add protocols to the agreement far away from the prying eyes of the public with no ability whatsoever to reject them.

“The agreement would set up a universal health preparedness review. It calls for the scheduling of tabletop simulation exercises, and it would trigger a massive expansion of the pharmaceutical hospital emergency industrial complex.”

Speaking on CHD.TV, Roguski compared the WHO’s proposed texts with its 2003 Framework Convention for Tobacco Control, one of only two legally binding treaties the WHO has ratified since its inception in 1948, referring to the bureau’s text as a “cookie-cutter copy” of the framework.

On his Substack, Roguski wrote that this framework “seeks to enable the member nations to agree to a relatively vague document now, that would empower and authorize unknown bureaucrats to make legally-binding decisions at some point in the future, when those decisions can be well-hidden from the view of the general public.”

In his opening address to the WHA, Tedros praised the 2003 framework.

Noting that many articles in the bureau’s text contain various “options” that could be chosen or rejected, Roguski wrote that this “seems to indicate that the member nations are very far from agreement.”

Separately, Roguski told The Defender that some delegates at the WHA expressed “displeasure” at not having received updated versions of either the bureau’s text or the IHR amendments.

“Quite frankly, they’re a mess,” Roguski added. “They’re arguing amongst themselves and as far as I know, there has been no type of vote on anything.”

According to the Geneva Health Files, “Countries also indicated that they wanted greater coordination between the negotiating processes of the amendments to the IHR and Pandemic Accord.”

According to Stand for Health Freedom, the co-chair of the working group drafting the proposed IHR amendments “expressed a handful of times that the IHR already has all it needs to address a pandemic; the only issue was compliance,” leading to a possible interpretation that the IHR amendments may be considered unnecessary.

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