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Despite the
catastrophic collapse of European democracy in the 1930s, it appears
that the tale of the twentieth century - in which citizens, cowed by
existential threats, acquiesced in the rejection of liberty and
truth in favor of obedience and propaganda, whilst allowing
despotic leaders to seize ever more absolutist powers - is
perilously close to being forgotten.
As concerned scholars and jurists have detailed, these agreements threaten to fundamentally reshape the relationship between the WHO, national governments, and individuals.
They would hardwire into international law a top-down supranational approach to public health in which the WHO, acting in some cases via the sole discretion of one individual, its 'Director' General (DG 2020 - Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus), would be empowered,
A global system for digital 'health certificates' for verification of vaccine status or test results would be routinised, and a bio-surveillance network whose purpose would be to identify viruses and variants of concern - and to monitor national compliance with WHO policy directives in the event of them - would be embedded and expanded.
For any of these sweeping powers to be invoked, there would be no requirement for an "actual" health emergency in which people are suffering measurable harm.
It is hard to overstate the impact of these proposals on Member States' sovereignty, individual human rights, foundational principles of medical ethics, and child welfare.
As currently drafted, these proposals would deny UK sovereignty and governmental autonomy over health and social policies and, through the indirect impacts of forced lockdowns and quarantines and because each Member State would be required to commit a staggering minimum of 5 percent of national health budgets and an as yet unspecified percentage of GDP towards the WHO's 'pandemic' prevention and response, also over critical aspects of economic policy.
The proposed new powers would cut across not only the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but also the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
They would signal a new watershed in our understanding of cornerstone human rights:
Provisions requiring - in particular - the WHO to develop fast-tracked regulatory guidelines for the "rapid" (aka relaxed) approval of a broad range of health products including vaccines, gene-based therapies, medical devices and diagnostics threatens, in the view of legal jurists,
Indeed, nothing in these documents would oblige the WHO to differentiate its binding directions for their impact on children, thus allowing for,
As if this weren't troubling enough, what makes it more so is that, as Thomas Fazi writes,
As he and others explain, the evolving funding structure of the organization and in particular the influence of corporate organizations focusing on 'pandemic' response solutions (predominantly, vaccines), has steered the WHO away from its original ethos of,
Over 80 percent of the WHO's budget is now 'specified' funding by way of voluntary contributions typically earmarked for specific projects or diseases in a way that the funder specifies.
History lesson
If only we were minded to be taught, there would be lessons to be learned of how far down the path of tyranny 'pandemic' authoritarianism has already taken us and of how, if the WHO's plans proceed, the Covid 'pandemic' may yet signal just the beginning.
...and indeed it now would seem that the voluntary obedience given so heedlessly by global citizens in 2020-22:
All of these measures, and more, now embedded in the proposals as potentially mandatory directives, binding on both Member States, and therefore on individual citizens.
Lesson Three, "Beware the one-party state," reminds us that,
The WHO does not masquerade as a political party but nor will it need to after ordaining itself as the exclusive global controller not just of the identification of 'pandemic's and potential 'pandemic's but of the design and execution of 'pandemic' responses, while also granting itself a vast health surveillance network and a global workforce - funded in part by the taxpayers of the nations over whom it shall tower - commensurate with its new supreme status.
Remembering professional ethics - Lesson Five - would have been sage advice in 2020 but much though we might lament the abandonment of medical ethics from our vantage point of 2023,
...the WHO proposals would ensure that such deviations from foundational pillars of medical ethics - informed consent, disregard for human dignity, bodily autonomy, freedom from experimentation, even - can become an accepted norm, rather than an abhorrent exception.
Beware, warns Synder, of the,
Positioned as a necessary next step for achieving global public health coordination and cooperation, the WHO's proposals would erect a permanent, global surveillance infrastructure and bureaucracy whose raison d'être will be to seek out and suppress health emergencies.
The funding for this network will originate from the private and corporate interests that stand to gain financially from the vaccine-based responses they envision, so the opportunities for private exploitation of public health crises will be huge.
And, by broadening and bringing forward in time the circumstances in which those powers might be triggered - no longer is an 'actual' public health emergency required, merely the 'potential' for such an event, we can expect the threat of the exceptional state of emergency to become a semi-permanent feature of modern life.
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" is a quote no less true for being incorrectly attributed to Jefferson, but having lived amongst the debris of failed Covid authoritarianism for three years.
Perhaps we are too close now to understand how far from liberal democracy we've already fallen.
Even if one wholeheartedly agreed with the WHO's focus on 'pandemic' preparedness and the interventionist responses provoked, to grant such sweeping powers to a supranational organization (let alone one individual within that), would be astonishing.
That, as the 'pandemic' response so brutally illustrated, the profit-optimized version of the greater good pursued by the WHO often clashes with child health and welfare, sets us up to commit a grotesque misdeed against our children and young people.
Snyder's most important lesson might yet be,
The UK has been sufficiently consumed with national sovereignty to pull out of the EU - a poster child for democracy compared to the unelected WHO.
It would surely be unthinkable now to wave through proposals which would see the UK cede its sovereignty over key national health, social and economic policies to the WHO...
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