Onward and Upward
In September of 2021, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus put out a statement relaying the key points of what a series of unnamed reviews had recommended for “strengthening global health security.” Per Tedros, they had all recommended “better financing,” “better global governance,” and “a stronger, empowered, and sustainably financed WHO.”
For the sake of this betterment, Tedros had a solution: “To connect and underpin these ideas, I believe the time is right for an international treaty or other legally binding instrument to provide the framework for a more coherent and coordinated response to future epidemics and pandemics.”1
In keeping with the organization’s (some would say theatrical) presentation of itself as a public interest agency, in April of 2022, the WHO solicited public comment on the subject, although with a question in the form of what salesmen call an “assumptive close,” which is one in which “instead of asking the prospect if they'd like to buy, you instead ask how they'd like to buy.”2 The WHO asked how commenters would like a new instrument to be, not whether they wanted it.3
For the first round of hearings, the guiding question is the following:
“What substantive elements do you think should be included in a new international instrument on pandemic preparedness and response?”
A second round of public comments was scheduled for June of 2022. However, at the start of the month, the organization issued the following update:4
Update: The WHO Secretariat, following discussions with the INB Bureau, is postponing the second round of public hearings until a later date in order to ensure that the input to be gathered in that second round supports the continued work of the INB.
Dated June 1st, a report by the Secretariat quietly posted to the website on the first-round comments (which the WHO had not uploaded) revealed the probable reason, admitting that, “The majority of written contributions proposed that no international instrument should be established.”5
In September, having still not uploaded the first session’s comments, the WHO would put out terms of participation for the second round of public hearings, requiring participants to submit video and show ID, with the additional caveat that the WHO could elect not to post contributions at its sole discretion.6 The ID requirement was particularly absurd, amounting to a proof of citizenship requirement for an organization with “World” in the title. Cynics were also incensed at the possibility, however remote, of outing themselves to an organization with diplomatic immunity (including with respect to use of their data) as probable non-compliers in any future two-tiered society predicated on biopharmaceutical compliance (something which, post-COVID, could no longer be regarded as mere conspiracy theory).
Even with these deterrents, and with the WHO curating many videos out of the two broadcast sessions, the remainder still included what Health Policy Watch derided as a “flotilla of conspiracy theorists.”7
The more genuine snapshot of public opinion, the more than 33,000 written comments submitted for the first session, had been quietly uploaded with a single link to an excel file just a day prior to the broadcast. Despite the assumptive phrasing of the prompt question, virtually every single one was vehemently opposed to any new pandemic instrument at all.8
As time went on, increasing awareness (with varying degrees of accuracy) and pushback was also emerging on social and alternative media. Due to the overwhelmingly negative public response to his advocacy of a legally binding instrument to strengthen and empower his own organization, Tedros would address the “claim that the Accord will cede power to WHO” at a press conference in advance of the 2023 World Health Assembly, dismissing it as “fake news.”
To justify this, Tedros said, “Countries will decide what the Accord says, and countries alone. And countries will implement the Accord in line with their own national laws.”9
This was a trivial argument. Those who raised power-ceding concerns obviously did so based on the belief that their countries (or rather, their countries’ bureaucrats) were liable to, indeed, voluntarily agree to arrangements with the WHO, but that those agreements would result in undesirable effects later on.
Moreover, Tedros’s statement, which mentioned the term “Accord” five times, was completely silent on the concurrent process to amend the International Health Regulations (IHR), towards which much of the criticism had by that point begun to be directed.
This was not because Tedros was oblivious to, or failed to recognize the role of the IHR revisions in the Pandemic Accord. On day two of the WHO’s under-publicized second International Negotiating Body (INB) session, Tedros himself had stated, “the IHR revision process underway will also strengthen the INB or the Agreement.”10
Why then, the press conference omission of precisely that which was then receiving the most critical attention? Every draft of the Accord had scores of instances of mandatory legal language (legalese command-words like “shall”). How much worse could the IHR revisions be?
Actual text from the WHO’s official “Article-by-Article Compilation of Proposed Amendments to the International Health Regulations”11 follows:
Page 2:
Page 12:
Page 20:
And, as if three amendments serving to make WHO “recommendations” mandatory weren’t enough, page 3 had text updated with the following:
While the public remained woefully under-informed about both the Pandemic Accord and the IHR amendments alike, there was no comparison between the two in terms of coverage. The Accord has been heralded in multiple articles in historic publications such as the New York Times1213 and the Washington Post.1415 The IHR amendments, by contrast, went virtually unmentioned. Such asymmetry is simply a product of what the WHO chooses to publicize, suggesting that the obscuring of the IHR amendments had been deliberate.
To the extent they were aware of the above amendments, many commentators attributed them to the “treaty” (itself a misnomer even in reference to the Accord/Agreement, as it is considered an Executive Agreement, not a treaty, in US law, which is supposed to exempt it from the initiatory requirement of ratification by the Senate), an understandable mistake with which various “Fact-Checking” sites were having a field day, engaging in lies of omission by refusing to mention the amendments from which the statements obviously derived.
Moreover, unlike the Accord, a brand new agreement under Article 19 of the WHO Constitution, which requires 2/3 of delegates for approval, amending the existing IHR requires a simple majority. A cynic would argue that the lower barrier for passage and lesser degree of public attention would make the IHR amendment route the perfect clandestine vehicle.
Those unwilling to be cynical may do well to recall that such moves are at least potentially worth trillions of dollars to related industries.16 Given, among other methods, the notorious revolving door in medicine, which has been empirically shown to be egregious in its assignment of former health bureaucrats to cushy pharmaceutical jobs1718 (a particularly brazen practice even of the industry that leads all others in lobbying politicians19), it’s little wonder delegates so often vote as they’re supposed to. (Relatedly, infamous lobbyist Jack Abramoff cited the revolving door structure as the “best way” of “owning” congressmen and their staffs, and also prided himself on innovative ways of obscuring provisions from public awareness.20)
Despite legacy media’s lack of interest in anything the WHO wasn’t spoon-feeding to it, independent media’s scrutiny finally forced the removal of the above provisions.
The truth is, however, that the WHO was never likely to be able to operate that way. Such absurd overreach was simply unlikely to pass muster domestically for e.g. implementing legislation. The dynamic at play was always more nuanced than that.
Muddying the waters in real time, the lion’s share of the process is continually obscured as much of the deliberations have been confidential.21
This “veil of secrecy” has enraged various NGOs and activists, who put out a scathing rebuke of the US and China’s unholy alliance to ensure that the WHO obscures negotiating text documents from the public. A letter signed by Health Action International (HAI), Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), Oxfam America, People’s Vaccine Alliance (PVA), Public Citizen and STOPAIDS roared, “No one doubts the ability of industry lobbyists to obtain access to the negotiating text documents, creating an information and influence asymmetry that is inappropriate for public health norm-setting.”22
However, in the last month or so before the 2024 World Health Assembly, an updated version of the IHR amendments (which are being rushed through in violation of the WHO’s own rules of procedure23) and a new draft of the Pandemic Agreement (for which there have been many) have both come online. A brief analysis of those is next.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYRQ9BD4OZM
https://sellingsignals.com/assumptive-close/
http://web.archive.org/web/20220413184038/https://inb.who.int/
http://web.archive.org/web/20220604193646/https://inb.who.int/
http://web.archive.org/web/20220907180906/https://inb.who.int/home/public-hearings/second-round/terms-of-participation
https://healthpolicy-watch.news/from-the-equity-to-conspiracies-people-say-what-they-want-from-a-pandemic-treaty/
https://inb.who.int/home/public-hearings/second-round
https://jamesroguski.substack.com/p/help-wanted-analyzing-who-public
https://apps.who.int/gb/inb/e/e_inb-2.html
Intergovernmental Negotiating Body - Day 4 (~4:55)
https://apps.who.int/gb/wgihr/pdf_files/wgihr1/WGIHR_Compilation-en.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/world/europe/world-health-treaty-pandemics.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/01/world/who-pandemic-treaty.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/26/who-tedros-covid-19-pandemic/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/01/who-coronavirus-pandemic-agreement-treaty/
https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/patient-support-advocacy/pandemic-helped-drive-health-spending-past-4-trillion-2020
https://web.archive.org/web/20230820102722/https://www.statista.com/statistics/257364/top-lobbying-industries-in-the-us/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHiicN0Kg10
https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/international-health-regulations/report_first-rc-meeting--6-oct-2022.pdf?sfvrsn=45adfee3_1&download=true
https://healthpolicy-watch.news/us-accused-of-supporting-veil-of-secrecy-over-pandemic-accord-negotiations-as-who-extends-countries-textual-deadline/
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-who-proposals-an-open-letter/