The author of this substack, Michael Senger, a San Francisco attorney was one of the first people I saw who pointed out that the Chinese response to Covid-19 was not just weird, not just unprecedented but actually seemed a bit like economic warfare.
Here he is on the report to the 75th World Health Assembly, Governing Body of the W.H.O., which began today and is expected to run through May 28.
Social media has been abuzz with terrifying news about a new Pandemic Treaty (officially the “Zero draft report of the Working Group on Strengthening WHO Preparedness and Response to Health Emergencies to the Seventy-fifth World Health Assembly”) currently being deliberated by the members of the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.
According to some commentators, the treaty “risks superseding parliamentary democracy, public health laws and human rights within 194 countries.” “If the WHO pandemic treaty is signed,” writes another commentator, “your vote will never ever count again.”
As the author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World, I’m not going to complain about the alarmism, as all these comments seem to be implicit endorsements of my work. But the good news is that’s not what the Pandemic Treaty really does.
What does the Pandemic Treaty actually change? Nothing, really. The treaty contains 131 proposals in ten broad categories: 1. Political leadership, 2. Cooperation and collaboration, 3. WHO at the center, 4. Financing, 5. Sustainability of COVID-19 innovative mechanisms, 6. Global surveillance, 7. Strengthening the International Health Regulations, 8. Universal health and preparedness review pilot, 9. Travel measures. 10. Equity.
The proposals are technical and banal. More funding for the WHO “to act as the directing and coordinating authority on international health.” Regular simulation exercises. More research to “inform and expand” public health and social measures during pandemics. More capacity for genomic testing. More sharing of public health data with the WHO. Digital vaccination certificates and contact tracing. More vaccines for developing countries.
Technically, none of this is binding on member nations. The consultants behind the Pandemic Treaty even cite “national sovereignty” as a limitation on the treaty’s effect.
Of all the proposals, the most immediately alarming is the plan to strengthen “approaches to and capacities for information and infodemic management… in order to build public trust in data, scientific evidence and public health measures and to counter inaccurate information and unsubstantiated rumours.” This particular provision involves private, supranational organizations and therefore does bypass national sovereignty.
In other words, the Pandemic Treaty is everything the WHO has already been doing—but more of it. So what’s actually at stake if the treaty is passed?
Everything.
The real significance of the Pandemic Treaty is that its passage is a ratification and approval of everything the world has experienced over the past two years during COVID-19. A brief refresher on those events....
....MUCH MORE
The former Ethiopian Minister of Health and perhaps more importantly Minister of Foreign Affairs, 2012–2016, announced his candidacy for Director-General of the World Health Organization in 2016.
If you recall those were were the years when the New Silk Road became the OBOR, One Belt One Road Strategy. The world was amazed, the Chinese were talking of a trillion dollar investment and we had not yet seen the debt effects on places like Sri Lanka and Djibouti and Kenya and Pakistan was raring to go and, well, it was 2016.
And China's Margaret Chan was going to wrap up her second five year term as D-G in 2017 and that spelled opportunity.
But first they had to change the rules and this is where we'll start the story....
