by Eugyppius, Daily Sceptic:
The WHO Pandemic Agreement has worried many, and justifiably so. Covid has taught us all to be wary of people who talk about pandemics, of people who plan for pandemics and above all of people peddling various snake oils and schemes to mitigate pandemics. The prospect of an international treaty to further encourage these evils is in itself very bad, whatever it actually provides for. Pandemics, I will never tire of repeating, are social constructs, and if you don’t want to have them, you should try thinking less about them. Seasonal respiratory viruses in fact represent a comparatively small threat to humanity; it is entirely in our reaction to them that the danger lies.
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All of the wrong people have left their fingerprints on the WHO Pandemic Agreement. The idea originated in November 2020 with Charles Michel, the President of the European Council. The G7 and the World Health Organisation both threw their support behind the concept in 2021. There have now been at least seven rounds of negotiations, culminating in an awkwardly named ‘Proposal for negotiating text of the WHO Pandemic Agreement‘, published on October 30th 2023. As the title says, this is only a proposal. There will be further haggling before the final Agreement comes up for a vote in May at the World Health Assembly in Geneva. We do not yet know whether there will even be a pandemic treaty, how much of it will be legally binding, how much of it will be happy bold words, or even what these words will be.
We only know the proposal, and for my sins, I have read it several times. I can report that it has its bad moments, but that these are vastly outweighed by its banality. Someday, perhaps somebody will explain what it is about the international globaloid order that encourages the production of so much long, unreadable and clearly unnecessary verbiage.
The draft opens with a preamble, where the “Parties to the WHO Pandemic Agreement” spend a page and a quarter “recognising”, “recalling,”, “noting”, “reaffirming”, “reiterating”, “underscoring”, “acknowledging” and being “deeply concerned” about various things. Among the matters that they recognise is how great the WHO is, and among the things they are deeply concerned about are “the gross inequities… that hindered… equitable access to medical and other COVID-19 pandemic-related products”. This line, right at the beginning, is an important signal about what the Pandemic Agreement actually is. Contrary to many assessments, it is not a blueprint for global hygiene dictatorship, but rather a bureaucratic scheme to steer more magical “pandemic-related products” – above all, vaccines – into the Third World, where people are least interested in them.
Having cleared our internationalist throats, we proceed to Article 1, which defines various terms. Here we learn, for example, that the neologism infodemic “means too much information, false or misleading information, in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak. It causes confusion and risk-taking behaviours that can harm health. It also leads to mistrust in health authorities and undermines public health and social measures”.
Yes, the WHO worries that it is a problem if we the rabble are exposed to “too much information”; infodemic levels of information may confuse us and cause us to self-harm. It is easy to worry about things like this, but perhaps harder to recognise that these are little more than free-floating concepts in the proposal, tied to no concrete provisions at all. Despite its appearance in the introductory glossary, for example, the word “infodemic” occurs only once more in the entire text. This is in Article 9, section 2, subsection (d), where the parties to the treaty are commanded to “promote… knowledge translation and evidence-based communication tools… relating to pandemic prevention… including infodemic management”. What the significance of this can be, given that all of our countries are already deeply interested in virus propaganda, is very unclear, and our proposal has no interest in specifying.
