Opinion
Rule of Thumb: if Helen Clark is for it, it’s probably a really, really bad idea. Especially if it’s yet another UN boondoggle. Especially when it’s a UN boondoggle overseen by an agency even more thoroughly discredited than usual.
After all, let’s not forget that a UN agency has been complicit for years in disseminating violently anti-Semitic material in Gaza, as well as “sexual misconduct, nepotism, retaliation, discrimination and other abuses of authority”. Nor that hundreds of its employees were and are members of Hamas, a proscribed terror group. Worse, dozens of UN employees directly participated in the horrific October 7 attacks.
UN “peacekeepers” have been exposed running child sexual abuse rings around the world.
The UN’s World Health Organization has been dubbed “China’s coronavirus accomplice”, for its all-too-willing participation in the communist nation’s cover-ups of first the original outbreak of Covid-19, and then the origins of the virus itself.
So, it’s not exactly the organisation you’d want stepping into to take control of your country should another pandemic be declared.
Yet, that’s exactly what Helen Clark is screeching and flapping her arms, demanding.
World leaders are reigniting calls for a pandemic agreement to be finalised, more than two years since negotiations began.
Among them is former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Helen Clark.
And Tony Blair. Yes, that Tony Blair. And there’s also Ban-ki Moon, “widely regarded as a failure”, and described as “the dullest—and among the worst” of UN Secretaries-General.
Such company Aunty Helen keeps.
She said a pandemic agreement is about avoiding another “catastrophe like Covid-19.”
‘A simple humanitarian principle says we have to do everything we can to stop history repeating itself“, Clark concluded.
Stuff
And Clark’s beloved pandemic treaty would do just that, repeating all the worst failures of horrifically mishandled official response to Covid-19. In fact, making them worse.
Because at least bungling petty dictators like Jacinda Ardern and “Dictator Dan” Andrews were answerable to voters. If Clark gets her way, unelected UN bureaucrats will potentially be handed oversight of supposedly sovereign states.
Though called an ‘accord’ so as not to frighten democrats who still like that old-fashioned thing called accountability, it is a significant power grab by an unelected body that seems determined now to set down rules for how countries should react to future pandemics. Never waste a good crisis, as the saying goes […] buried within the proposed treaty, and a parallel set of recommended changes to the International Health Regulations, is a grant to the WHO of power to instruct governments on how to manage societies during a pandemic, vesting that power in the director-general.
These undertakings would be ‘legally binding’ as the G20 leaders stated in Bali in 2022 and New Delhi in 2023.
Sweden, as we all know, swam against the tide of panic which swept Western governments. Instead of locking down, it implemented minimal measures and trusted its citizens to make the best decisions for their health. It reaped the rewards: despite hysterical claims to the contrary, it did not suffer any worse excess deaths than other countries. More importantly, it avoided the devastating economic and social consequences of failed lockdown policies.
Under the proposed pandemic treaty, would the WHO be able to stop it doing so next time? The answer would appear to be, “yes”.
The suggested amendment leaves little doubt as to who would be in charge: ‘ States . . . recognise WHO as the guidance and coordinating authority of international public health response during public health Emergency of International Concern and undertake to follow WHO’s recommendations in their international public health response.’
Why would anyone be so foolish as to let the WHO take over their country during a pandemic?
The WHO has a terrible track record in managing epidemics, not least in its response to Covid-19, where it made a series of bad mistakes and did China’s bidding. The Pandemic Accord would be a reward for failure.
And what a lucrative reward it would be.
The accord would oblige countries to greatly increase funding of the WHO in the event of a pandemic, to pay for the ‘containment of spill-over at source’ and to hand over products such as vaccines ‘in accordance with timetables to be agreed between the WHO and manufacturers’ […]
Countries would also agree to limit criticism of the WHO in order to ‘combat false, misleading, misinformation or disinformation’. This very article could in theory be censored by our government at the behest of the WHO.
Daily Mail
No wonder Helen Clark’s so gung-ho for it.