A draft global ‘pandemic treaty’ has not yet been negotiated, but WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is confident that it is only a matter of time before an agreement is reached.
The World Health Assembly, the governing body of the WHO, is meeting all week in Geneva. Health officials from the WHO’s 194 member states are trying to wrap up more than two years of negotiations to establish globally binding rules, ostensibly to deal more effectively with “pandemics” and similar health crises in the future.
The focus is on a legally binding pandemic treaty, ostensibly to strengthen the world’s defenses against future post-covid-19 pathogens. However, negotiations have been protracted and last week failed to produce draft agreements for the assembly to formally adopt, Reuters reports.
– Of course, we all wish that we had been able to reach a consensus on the agreement in time for this health assembly, and cross the finish line, the director-general said in his opening remarks.
– I remain confident that you still will, because where there is a will, there is a way. I know that there remains among you a common will to get this done, he continued.
Negotiations to update existing health rules for outbreaks are still ongoing, and negotiators say an agreement is close.
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“Failed supranational body”
Critics have argued that the treaty’s purpose is to allow the world’s states to be governed even more centrally than today in the event of declared “crises” or “pandemics” and that the World Health Organization wants the power to impose harsh repression and lockdowns in individual countries. Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage says the WHO has become “a failing, expensive, unelected, unaccountable, supranational body” that wants to “run roughshod” over nation states and dictate health policy.
– Let’s have a proper debate about what the WHO is for. We don’t want this treaty to be signed, we think the WHO should go back to first principles… It’s shocking that someone in Geneva that we didn’t vote for could force us into lockdown, he said.
