Latest Draft of WHO Pandemic Treaty Revealed

By | April 25, 2024

NEW YORK, April 26 (C-Fam) The Biden administration failed to get an explicit reference to abortion or “sexual and reproductive health” in the latest draft of a new international pandemic treaty. The treaty nonetheless grants broad new swaths of power to the pro-abortion World Health Organization.

The latest draft of a new binding international treaty on pandemic preparedness does not contain any reference to abortion or “sexual and reproductive health”, as the Biden administration originally hoped to achieve last year. The Biden administration appears to have settled for the concept of “equity” as the guiding objective of the entire treaty instead.

The concept of equity is inherently ambiguous and is expected to give the international health agency and western donors wide latitude for mischief, including promoting abortion and gender ideology.

U.S. State Department and Western government agencies define equity by reference to gender ideology, which includes abortion and homosexual/trans rights. Most developing countries, on the other hand, only see equity as having to do with equal access to resources and medicines during a pandemic.

The concept of equity is also likely to result in interference by the international health agency into all areas of policy, not just pandemic or health policies.

According to the treaty preamble, equity requires reviewing all national policies including “social, environmental, cultural, political and economic” policies that may impact health in any way. And the treaty states that this applies “both during and between pandemics.”

This is likely to result in pressure on traditional countries to adopt gender ideology and other Western policy preferences as a condition to receive international health assistance. Indeed, the pandemic treaty establishes a new body to review requests for international health assistance for pandemics. The binding mechanism is expected to channel billions of dollars of health assistance, giving Western countries unprecedented leverage to change national laws and policies in recipient countries.

How the agreement will be seen in the U.S. remains a subject of controversy. Conservative U.S. lawmakers want the agreement to be submitted for advice and consent by the U.S. Senate, as required by the U.S. Constitution. But the Biden administration may try to bypass that. Contrary to common misconceptions, the agreement will indeed be binding. It includes the phrase “States Parties shall” over forty times.

Also in the balance is a set of amendments to the 2005 International Health Regulations (IHR), an already existing agreement on technical cooperation between countries during international health emergencies.

If the pandemic treaty fails the IHR amendments, which are easier to achieve, it will give enough leverage to Western countries to achieve many of their aims for the pandemic treaty. These will not be submitted to the U.S. Senate for advice and consent.

The amendments make it a requirement for national governments to follow the directions of the World Health Organization during a pandemic, including giving power to the Director-General of the international health agency to declare a pandemic emergency. They are specifically designed to prevent countries from taking different courses of action, as happened during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, when the Trump administration openly feuded with the World Health Organization.

Both agreements are expected to be finalized by May 27, in time for the next session of the World Health Assembly, the governing body of the international health agency.

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