OPINION:
The World Health Organization is finalizing with its partner states the details of a pandemic treaty that is supposed to protect the citizens of the globe from future COVID-like devastations.
America’s only suitable response is to tell the WHO to take a hike.
Unfortunately, this is Joe Biden’s administration, the very same that forced free American citizens to take shots they didn’t want, to wear face coverings they didn’t want and to stay away from places they didn’t want to stay away from, and to obey government’s every ever-moving, ever-shifting orders, dictates and mask mandates as best medical practices. And that’s pretty much the powers the WHO pinheads now want. Team Biden and WHO, on pandemic-related controls, are of the same mind and nature. Haven’t we suffered enough?
A tyrant is a tyrant is a tyrant is a tyrant, whether that tyrant serves as commander-in-chief in the White House, or as a once-upon-a-Microsoft-time-turned-know-it-all-fake-doctor, or as a Little Napolean-like medical bureaucrat run amok with media adoration, or as a director-general of a global organization called WHO. Tyrants come in many forms — and after three-plus years of coronavirus tyranny, Americans should know better not to trust a government official, especially one claiming expertise in the field of health.
In America, individuals know best how to direct their medical treatments.
Doctors, medical experts, health specialists and especially, most especially, members of the medical bureaucracy — from local to federal to global — are only there to advise. If this pandemic treaty comes into being; if America gets on board with this pandemic treaty; if Americans allow the Democrats in positions of power and influence to bring to fruition this pandemic treaty — expect COVID On Steroids to come.
The Intergovernmental Negotiating Body, INB, tasked by the WHO to create the treaty has spent hundreds of hours trying to hammer out an international agreement on how governments of the world will respond to health threats in the future. But for America, none of the matters. For America, the only thing that matters is the answer to this question: In health decisions, which opinion dominates — the government’s? Or the individual’s? And if the terms of the treaty call for the first to take precedence over the second, then the conclusion is clear: Americans don’t need this treaty.
And truthfully, the treaty does boot individual rights and the individual’s right to choose to the side.
One phrase of concern: “[This treaty will] clarify responsibilities between states and international organizations, and establish and reinforce legal obligations and norms.”
One word of concern that repeats throughout the text of the treaty: equity.
One matter of importance the treaty outright fails to address: the responsibility of China in bringing COVID to the world, and then refusing to allow outside inspectors and investigators to determine the scope of China’s responsibility. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t address the root of the problem.
Rather than serving as a guide to good governance during times of national and international medical crises, this treaty instead calls for the forced sharing of technological, scientific and biological data — with even those governments that are communist; and cedes too much sovereign decision-making ability to a single global source, the WHO’s director-general, a role currently held by the card-carrying socialist and communist-loving Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Who elected this WHO guy to tell America how to respond to diseases?
Therein lies the problem.
These people at WHO aren’t elected. They’re not accountable to the American citizenry. They’re not able to be booted from office by U.S. voters. They’re lifetime bureaucrats of the highest government orders, and peel back the pages of their bios and it’s glaringly apparent they care little for the American way of liberty, the kind that calls for the political classes to remain subservient to the individual; the kind that recognizes and respects the notion of God-given individual liberties and rights.
It’s OK if the WHO wants to gather and discuss lessons learned from COVID, as well as debate better practices for any future pandemics. That’s in line with the WHO’s core function.
But it’s horrific to think of America turning over its medical decision-making abilities to a global group that isn’t just decidedly anti-American, but worse, actually pro-communist and pro-China.
“Biden Must Move Fast to Replace WHO’s Tedros,” Foreign Policy wrote in September of 2021, when the director general faced a reelection battle.
The magazine continued: “After repeatedly endorsing the Chinese Communist Party’s slow and secretive response to the COVID-19 pandemic and helping it conceal the origins of the outbreak, [Tedros] is asking the United States and other WHO member nations to support his bid. … Biden must … decide whether to support a candidate who habitually defers to Beijing or back another candidate who can steer the WHO in the direction of much-needed reform.”
In May of 2022, Tedros won another five-year term to lead the WHO.
Let the American buyer beware. The Senate would still have to ratify this treaty and commit America as a partnering state. But even without ratification, this administration — any Democrat administration, for that matter — could still express intent to abide its terms, and could still use it as a pressure point and political weapon to compel adherence to and compliance with WHO’s future health advisements. Remember, Barack Obama accepted the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, committing America to a path of basically no-growth; Donald Trump withdrew America; Joe Biden put America back under its terms. The very existence of a treaty that’s antithetical to American interests is the threat.
And as threats to American interests go, this pandemic treaty is the big kahuna.
American citizens must never, ever, ever lose their individual rights to determine their own medical and health treatments. We saw under COVID what can happen when those individual rights are seized by federal and state and local governments. Such power in the hand of a global government removed from accountability and cleared of all ballot-box consequences would mean a total destruction of all that free Americans hold dear.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Lockdown: The Socialist Plan To Take Away Your Freedom,” is available by clicking HERE or clicking HERE or CLICKING HERE.
For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.
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