The World Health Organization’s (W.H.O.) draft of a proposed global pandemic agreement or treaty could trap America into commitments to promote abortion, limit global free speech, and offer the U.N. agency exorbitant funding, experts convened by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) on Monday warned.
The W.H.O., under the leadership of widely discredited Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has been attempting to expand its global public health authority through a new international legal document since at least 2021 when it convened an “intergovernmental negotiating body” to draft a proposed treaty on how to address pandemics.
The “pandemic treaty” idea is a direct response to the W.H.O.’s poor handling of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, in which it failed to declare the outbreak of a novel disease in Wuhan, China, a public health emergency of international concern in a timely manner and committed several other critical errors. The W.H.O. notably allowed the Chinese Communist Party to destroy critical evidence — including early samples of what was later determined to be a novel coronavirus — and published Chinese claims that the virus was not transmissible from person to person, which was later proven false.
The W.H.O.’s negotiating body successfully drafted a text that it referred to as the “W.H.O. convention, agreement or other international instrument on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response,” or “WHO CA+,” as the countries involved could not agree on whether the document will be a treaty or not. In the United States, entering a treaty requires the consent and approval of the Senate. That document has since been updated and is expected to be presented to W.H.O. countries at the World Health Assembly in May.
The debates surrounding the provisions of the bill have been contentious, however, and Tedros has openly expressed frustration with state governments that they have yet to give in to his agency’s demands. In January, addressing the executive board of the W.H.O., Tedros complained that the push for a pandemic treaty was being sabotaged by a “torrent of fake news, lies, and conspiracy theories,” and shamed parties opposing the pact, declaring, “a failure to deliver the pandemic agreement and the IHR amendments will be a missed opportunity for which future generations may not forgive us.”
The IHR are the “International Health Regulations,” existing international law that Tedros has pushed to amend to grant the W.H.O. more power over member states.
On Monday, Rep. Smith warned that even the updated document adopted from the WHO CA+ left too many open questions regarding American funding for the global agency and support for activities that have no public health benefit, including online censorship of free speech and the promotion of abortion.
“Far too little scrutiny has been given, far too few questions asked as to what this legally binding agreement or treaty means to health policy in the United States and elsewhere,” Rep. Smith, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations, asserted.
“It remains unclear whether the Biden Administration intends to submit this treaty/agreement to the Senate for its constitutionally-required advice and consent as a prerequisite for ratification,” Rep. Smith observed. “[It is also] unclear in the extreme as to how many billions of dollars U.S. taxpayers will be required to give pursuant to Article 20 of the Agreement in ‘annual monetary contributions … to the WHO Pandemic Agreement.'”
The document as it stands, the congressman noted, required the creation of a “sustainable funding mechanism,” but financial obligations would remain a mystery until after the signing of the document.
The potential misuse of the pandemic treaty to promote abortion around the world or silence free speech also concerned Rep. Smith. One of the articles of the latest draft of the “pandemic treaty” demands parties support “essential health services.” Rep. Smith noted that the United Nations formally lists abortion as a “health service.”
“There is absolutely no ambiguity here. Abortion is included in the list of essential health care services published by WHO in 2020 in the wake of COVID-19 [the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic] despite the fact that a majority of countries restrict and regulate abortion,” he said.
Rep. Smith also noted that the pandemic treaty draft demands signatories “combat false, misleading, misinformation or disinformation,” but offers no protections for free speech, including specificity regarding how it would define “combat” or “misinformation.”
Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) speaks at the Capitol in Washington on June 2, 2020. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)
“With regard to Covid-19, does that apply retroactively to the WHO and Director Tedros concerning the origins of Covid-19, misleading guidance and the malign influence of Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party on all matters related to the virus?” Rep. Smith asked. “Will there be any room for dissent on vaccines, therapeutics, virus transmission and the like — especially among scientists and health professionals — or will group think again crowd out other viewpoints?”
Also speaking at the press conference, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins condemned the proposed pandemic treaty as “a global power grab using any future emergency as justification to take that power.”
“Instead of reviewing and acknowledging its failures, the WHO seeks to submit its disastrous approach to the entire world as the way forward, in a binding agreement, which by its nature, not its name, is a treaty,” Perkins said, calling the document “first and foremost a global political, economic, and social manifesto.” It should be submitted to the U.S. Senate and not advanced as it is currently being advanced.
A spokesperson for the Alliance Defending Freedom International (ADF International), Megan Meador, condemned the provisions in the document targeting free speech, asserting that they “lend themselves to undue restrictions” on speech.
“We underscore that the Pandemic Agreement must not undermine existing international legal obligations concerning the protection of the human right to freedom of expression,” she said on behalf of her organization, “whose restrictions, including on the grounds of public health, must always be implemented with the utmost restraint and in the least restrictive manner possible.”
“Cognizant that there can be no free societies without freedom of expression, we must not allow ever-mounting challenges to determine the veracity of information in a globalized, tech-centric world to unduly restrict free speech,” Meador said.