Call for Ireland’s UN team to reject WHO’s ‘pandemic treaty’

Ireland’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Noel White, along with World Health Organisation negotiators, are being urged to reject the WHO’s ‘pandemic treaty’ over fears of a global ‘power grab’ and loss of established freedoms.

This comes as a new book, China, the Super Predator, warns that China, with its ruling Communist Party, is the controlling force behind the WHO.

A petition run by the conservative advocacy group CitizenGO, addressed to Mr White, as well as to delegates to the WHO’s Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB), states that the petition ‘comes from a place of deep concern for the future of global health governance and the preservation of individual freedoms and national sovereignty’, and has 420,000 signatures to date.

CitizenGO warns that WHO proposals, if approved, will allow enhanced control over countries, doctors, hospitals and other groups, impacting their decision-making, and reduce each country’s sovereignty and the individual’s right to decide on health. An ability to declare a pandemic would lead to controls on travel, communication, assembly and the workplace, while treaty measures to combat so-called misinformation would curb free speech.

Currently, the INB is in session until March 1 with the aim of pushing through key amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) so as to make sure they can be ratified at the World Health Assembly in May.

Last month, the Irish Council for Human Rights said a referendum must be put to the Irish people before the unelected WHO, under these amendments, could be allowed to hijack Ireland’s sovereignty. Such delegation of authority to the WHO, at least in an Irish context, would be found to be unconstitutional unless a referendum was put to the people. (See my article ‘Urgent call for Ireland to fight WHO ‘takeover’’).

Wide-ranging infiltration

Now, respected French journalist Pierre-Antoine Donnet, who has studied China for more than 40 years, writing in the context of China’s wide-ranging infiltration of UN affairs, points out that, in only a few years, China has seized control of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, the UN Industrial Development Organisation, the International Telecommunications Union, the International Civil Aviation Organisation — ‘and, indirectly, the WHO’.

Donnet’s book, China, the Super Predator: A Challenge for the Planet, published this month (February, 2024) by Changemaker Books, should set more alarm bells ringing. I shall be posting an interview with Donnet, and my review of his book, soon. Donnet is a former global chief editor at the French news agency AFP, and a former Beijing and UN correspondent.

Meanwhile, Ireland’s Department of Health told me this week that ‘officials’ were participating in the WHO’s IHR working group, but declined to provide me with the names and contact details of the individuals concerned.

In response to queries I raised with the Department, Eoghan Flynn, private secretary to the Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly, told me: ‘There is no working draft of the International Health Regulations (IHR) available. However, following each working group meeting, a report is published which details the work undertaken. The most recent meeting of the working group took place from February 5–9, 2024, and a copy of the report is available on the WHO website.

‘No communications have been received by the Department of Health from the Director General of the WHO regarding amendments to the IHR. The proposed amendments to the IHR that are being discussed by the working group were submitted to the World Health Assembly in 2022. The mandate of the working group is to discuss those amendments.’

I suspected that no such documents from the Director General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, existed because the co-chair of the working group, Dr Abdullah Assiri, stated publicly on October 2, 2023, that the working group was unlikely to meet its January 27 deadline — hence the INB session under way this week and next.

The IHR working group will be meeting again from March 4–15, and the INB again from March 18–29. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has stated that no country will cede any sovereignty to the WHO, and that countries will implement the pandemic ‘accord’ with their own national laws.

* The Permanent Mission of Ireland to the UN and other international organisations at Geneva, headed by Noel White, a barrister, comprises a team drawn from Ireland’s Departments of Health, Foreign Affairs, Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Agriculture, and Food and the Marine.