by Madeleine Hubbard
The World Health Organization’s pending agreement on the global pandemic and the International Criminal Court’s request for arrest warrants for the leaders of a democratic country fighting terrorists are raising concerns about globalism, which critics say is backed by President Joe Biden’s policies.
“We should completely withdraw from the WHO. That’s obvious, the congressman from Wisconsin,” Rep. Glenn Grothman (pictured above) said this week on the TV show “All the News, No Noise.”
“We don’t want any future American administration, like the Biden administration, to say that because the WHO is doing something – recommending certain vaccines, recommending certain treatments – that we therefore have any obligation to agree to something like that,” the Republican lawmaker added .
WHO published a draft of its global agreement on the pandemic last month and the final version of the document is expected to be agreed upon by consensus at the May 27-June 1 meeting of the World Health Assembly.
“It is important to note that the decision of Member States to start this process in December 2021 [sic] express their shared desire to strengthen global coordination efforts to prepare for, prevent and respond to pandemics in light of Covid-19,” WHO told Just the News.
Former Republican presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann, who has been raising the alarm on the issue since at least 2022, told “Only the News, No Noise” that under the treaty the WHO “will be strengthened, strengthened and given even more powers, in fact world powers could decide about health.”
The concerns arise even though the current draft treaty includes safeguards that limit WHO’s authority.
“Nothing in the WHO Pandemic Agreement shall be construed” as conferring on WHO the power to amend or implement domestic law or impose any mandates, including rules on travel, vaccination, treatment and isolation, the draft states.
However, there are more than 300 proposed amendments to the treaty, and some of them “would significantly increase WHO’s public health emergency powers and constitute an unacceptable infringement of United States sovereignty,” according to a letter to President Joe Biden signed earlier by all Republicans in the Senate this year. month.
Bachmann said that if the treaty is passed, “we will go back to how it was during the pandemic, only worse, we would have no right of appeal.” …It would also create a surveillance state like the communist Chinese would create. And that would again take away and limit our constitutional freedoms” because of the huge number of things that the WHO considers health care to be.
Draft agreement “Recognize[es] the importance and impact on public health of growing threats such as climate change, poverty and hunger.”
However, it is unclear how the agreement’s language would raise oversight beyond what is already permitted under applicable international law. The agreement states that it aims to “strengthen pandemic prevention and public health surveillance capabilities, in line with the International Health Regulations.” This is an existing agreement that requires countries, including the United States, to report and respond to potential public health emergencies.
The current agreement has not been finalized and negotiations are ongoing, but Republicans are not the only ones expressing concerns about the agreement.
Human rights groups, notably Amnesty International, the Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the International Commission of Jurists and Human Rights Watch, argue that the agreement does not go far enough in preventing a global health catastrophe.
“Rather than acting on the lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic, the current proposed text offers a weak framework to ensure that countries are responsible for maintaining a rights-based response to future pandemics,” the four organizations wrote in a statement on the fall agreement.
Meanwhile, concerns are also being expressed about global governance in response to the ICC’s decision earlier this week to request arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant at the same time as Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniya.
Former Trump National Security Council official Robert Greenway said Congress should “put limits on the ICC” as the Trump administration did.
“The court is roguish, political in nature and serves no legitimate purpose. And as long as it pursues partisan political goals, it should not be supported by the United States, the United Nations or the international community,” he also said.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-LA, similarly criticized the ICC for making what he called a “baseless and illegal decision” to prosecute Netanyahu and Gallant.
While the future of both the ICC and the WHO pandemic agreement under Biden is unclear, if former President Donald Trump is re-elected this fall, he may decide to resume the process of withdrawing from the WHO and reinstate sanctions imposed on the ICC.
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Madeleine Hubbard is a reporter for Just the News.
Photo “Glenn Grothman” by US House of Representatives. Cover photo “Headquarters of the World Health Organization” by Yann CC3.0.
