April 19, 2024
The Biden administration is signing away American sovereignty and rushing the United States into a binding agreement that would establish a global body governing the most important health decisions during a pandemic, multiple members of Congress warned on Thursday.
The World Health Assembly plans to meet on May 27 to hammer out final amendments and details of the World Health Organization Pandemic Agreement. In its present form, the WHO Pandemic Agreement would empower greater censorship of disfavored viewpoints, redistribute 20% of all U.S. “pandemic-related products” to other nations, aims to create equity-driven national health care systems around the globe, and allows “no reservations” by signatory nations. The agreement does not define the term “pandemic” but creates a cadre of unelected bureaucrats known as the a “Governing Body” (formerly called the Conference of the Parties), which could further amend the agreement by a two-thirds vote of its members — not subject to individual members’ views.
The agreement instructs nations to assure the people do not experience an “infodemic,” which it defines as “too much information,” as well as “false or misleading information” which “leads to mistrust in health authorities and undermines public health and social measures.”
That would “make standard what we had to go through in COVID, where there was a silencing of any dissenting voices,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins during a 45-minute rally at the U.S. Capitol on Thursday morning. “What the Biden administration did in silencing dissenting voices would take place on a global basis,” he warned. “This needs to stop in its tracks now.”
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), who helped organize the event, agreed that Americans should be concerned about selective implementation of broad governmental authority. “We saw during the COVID pandemic, they shut businesses down, shut churches down,” but not well-connected businesses such as marijuana dispensaries and abortion facilities, said Rep. Norman told Perkins on “Washington Watch” Thursday afternoon.
WHO, which initially conceived of the global governance compact as a treaty, downgraded it to an agreement, as the Biden administration realized it cannot win the two-thirds majority necessary to ratify it under the Constitution. Yet by all accounts, the president plans to sign the “agreement” into law and force Americans to abide by its terms.
“This is a treaty,” Norman explained. Americans must “make sure that it goes through the Senate, that it has to get a two-thirds vote, and they have to advise and consent.” Americans cannot allow the Biden administration to sign away their birthright, he said. Norman added the WHO is supposed to give member nations four months to review its terms and amendments — yet it has not furnished the text of those documents with a little over one month before the pivotal meeting takes place.
“The best thing is to expose it, but right now there’s nothing to expose. They’re not telling us exactly what’s in this agreement,” Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), who also spoke at the rally, told Tony Perkins later on Thursday’s program. “But I think the fact that it’s all being hidden is reason enough to be very concerned.”
Johnson said WHO authorities tell him the lack of transparency comes from the delegates’ inability to agree on the agreement’s precise terms. “Let’s pray that that’s the case as opposed to something really devious,” he told Perkins.
“We take prayer seriously here,” responded Perkins. “That may be one of the ways to stop this thing, to pray that the confusion that has enveloped this process would cause the whole thing to collapse until we can get an administration that is willing to stand for American sovereignty.”
“Pray for a Tower of Babel within the World Health Organization,” responded Senator Johnson.
Three-quarters (75%) of Americans want U.S. officials to make public health decisions, and nearly two-thirds (64%) say the Senate must ratify the WHO agreement before it takes effect, according to a recent McLaughlin & Associates poll, which Johnson cited during the rally. The Wisconsin leader, who has long pledged to protect American sovereignty from global institutions, introduced the No WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty Without Senate Approval Act to require Biden submit the agreement for Senate confirmation.
Speakers at the Thursday morning rally, organized by the Sovereignty Coalition, warned the WHO Pandemic Agreement’s terms threaten not only American sovereignty but fundamental, constitutional liberties.
“This is the most important issue that is getting the least amount of attention relative to its importance,” said Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.). “The treaty would put us under the thumb of the U.N. and communist China and the WHO for whatever they wanted to declare a crisis, whether it’s poverty crisis, or a gun violence crisis or a climate crisis, or a health crisis, and make us listen to the WHO. That is not constitutional.”
“Would you like an international, multilateral organization to have determination on when we’re going to have an emergency health crisis and how we’re going to deal with it in the United States of America? We didn’t like it when our own government had that authority,” noted Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.). Biggs has introduced the WHO Withdrawal Act (H.R. 79), which would immediately end U.S. membership, repeal the legislation authorizing our WHO membership in 1948, and ban all U.S. funds from WHO projects.
Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) pointed out that WHO officials plan to redistribute global health resources “by equity, rather than need.” Some variant of the word “equity” appears in the document 34 times in 30 pages. Yet while WHO considers the United States a first-world nation, it deems China — the world’s second-largest economy, a “developing nation” and thus qualified to receive U.S. funds and supplies, numerous speakers noted. Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) had previously said WHO should retroactively apply the agreement’s provisions combatting so-called “disinformation” to the COVID pandemic, when Chinese Communist Party officials misled the world about the COVID pandemic.
While the U.S. may have to export a double-tithe of its pandemic-related ingenuity to China, it may import Chinese-style social controls, warned Reggie Littlejohn, co-founder of the Sovereignty Coalition and a decades-long expert on Chinese policy. Under the WHO Pandemic Agreement, the unelected Governing Body will “be able to mandate vaccines, mandate masks, mandate lockdowns, and mandate quarantines,” she said. “Also, they will be able to mandate that the governments of the world surveil and censor their citizens, no doubt through digital IDs, which can be used as the basis of a Chinese-style, social credit” system. Family Research Council has assessed that the WHO Pandemic Agreement puts in place the beginnings of “a turnkey totalitarian state.”
“Joe Biden continues his foolish pursuit of giving up our sovereignty,” vented Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.). Unfortunately, “The Biden administration is certainly the America Last administration,” said Rep. Good.
Whether Congress stands idly by and accepts the treaty comes down to a simple question, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) insisted: “Are we for standing up for Americans, or are we for ceding authority to international bodies to govern us and to shove their progressive, radical, Marxist ideas on the American people?” The Biden administration has already begun implementing some WHO concerns, such as suing the state of Tennessee for making it illegal for someone to engage in prostitution while knowingly infected with AIDS.
Americans should be doubly concerned about the WHO’s priorities under the leadership of WHO Secretary-General Tedros Ghebreyesus, warned Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy. “He is a Maoist involved in terrorism in his native Ethiopia, plucked from obscurity by the Chinese Communist Party to do this job. What is the job? To promote global governance.” Ghebreyesus began this year by releasing a bulletin that instructed “[p]olitical leaders at all levels” to “counteract conservative opposition” and “enact progressive laws” championing “sexual rights.”
Relinquishing sovereignty has spiritual, as well as national, implications, Matt Schlapp of CPAC pointed out. “Sovereignty is what God knits in our soul when He creates us. The idea of sovereignty in America is not some strange government term. It’s the ability of the individual to have the power and authority from God to govern their lives,” he said. If Americans do not reign in world government officials, “they will use health to push through all the most radical elements of their agenda.”
“The fact that we even have to have this press conference is breathtaking,” commented Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.). “As bad as it is in dealing with this government taking away our rights every single day, just imagine how difficult it’s going to be to drag our rights back away from some international organization of bureaucrats that aren’t even elected, that don’t care about America, don’t care about our Constitution, and don’t care what we think.”
The World Health Assembly begins its next meeting on May 27.
Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washinton Stand
