Opinion: End of the Sovereign State
Submitted by Carson Now Reader on Wed, 03/29/2023 - 3:37pm
The response to the recent pandemic was a collective learning experience on a global scale. Although the effects were world-wide, the response to the new contagion varied from region to region and nation to nation. From the draconian lockdowns in China to the moderate restrictions among liberty-loving Swedes, the world became a virtual laboratory for best and worse practices.
In hindsight, it is apparent that the response by the World Health Organization (the directing and coordinating authority on international health within the United Nations) was seriously flawed. Its willingness to minimize the importance of Beijing’s refusal to allow a WHO technical team to visit Wuhan to investigate the origin of the outbreak is a testament to the organization’s lack of resolve and its tendency to yield to the coercive influence of its members. In a moment of unvarnished candor, the WHO’s Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response described the WHO’s performance as a “toxic cocktail” of wrong decisions. Despite the WHO’s timidity and ineffectiveness during a crisis, there is now a movement underway (with the support of the current administration) to have members of the international community adopt an agreement on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response that would delegate additional, unprecedented powers to the WHO in the event of a future pandemic.
The initial so-called “Zero Draft” of the document would, among other things, allow the WHO to declare a pandemic, thereby triggering provisions in the agreement that would allow the reallocation of 20% of pandemic-related products to what it considers “priority populations”. In addition, each party would be expected to raise financial resources to implement this plan and would be required to “prioritize and increase or maintain …. domestic funding by allocating in its annual budget not lower that 5% of its current health expenditure to pandemic prevention, preparation, preparedness, response and health systems recovery”. Depending on how “health expenditure” is defined, this amount for the United States could be as high as $213 billion a year! It should be noted that this year’s presidential budget already includes $1.25 billion “to prepare for, prevent, detect and respond to infectious disease outbreaks”.
In addition, each party would be required to “allocate, in accordance with its respective capacities”, a yet to be determined percentage of its gross domestic product. Since China is considered by the U.N. to be a “developing country” it would be a likely beneficiary of the proposed transfer of technology and other goods and services despite its complicity in the gain-of-function research that created COVID-19 and irrespective of its well-known role in the theft of intellectual property from other countries.
Conspicuously absent from this agreement is any prohibition against gain-of-function research (making a pathogen more transmittable or deadly to human beings); an acknowledgment, based on field studies, that the use of certain inexpensive therapeutics like ivermectin (disparaged early in the pandemic as “horse medicine”) can be an effective alternative to expensive experimental vaccines; and a demand for strict adherence to the Nuremberg Code which requires voluntary consent before a human being is subjected to an experimental drug or procedure.
In conclusion, while I understand the notion that a more thoughtful and coordinated approach to future pandemics is warranted, this agreement would cede too much power to an organization that has not earned our trust, would place an enormous additional burden on our already weakened economy and would erode our national autonomy.
In the opinion of Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law, the proposed agreement would, in essence, “set up a worldwide medical police state under the control of the WHO” whose influence could ultimately filter down to our primary care physicians. In short, if approved by the U.S. Senate, this agreement would be a glorious achievement for rapacious globalists but a likely death knell for the sovereign state.
