WHO Pandemic Accords Are Badly Flawed

Ramesh Thakur

The decades-old International Health Regulations, as amended last year, came into effect on 19 September. A new Pandemic Agreement, adopted in May, will be opened for signature after a pathogens access and benefits sharing deal that is expected to be reached next year. The WHO Pandemic Accords, as the two documents are known, are a good example of the type of global governance initiatives on which there is a consensus among technocratic elites, but against which there is a rising populist revolt. Two other examples that were mentioned by President Donald Trump in his UN address on 23 September are immigration and climate change. The speech was a wide-ranging defence of national sovereignty against globalism.

Flawed Assumptions

Yet, pandemics are rare events that, compared to endemic infectious and chronic diseases, impose a low disease burden. The rationale for the accords rests on the false understanding that the risk of pandemics is rapidly growing, predominantly from increasing zoonotic spillover events in which pathogens move from animals to humans. Well-founded suspicion that Covid arose from gain-of-function research and a lab leak negates the second part of this justification The assumption of increasing pandemic risk is also undermined by work from the University of Leeds. They show that the reports of the WHO, World Bank, and G20 that back the pandemic agenda don’t support the agencies’ claims. Data show reducing mortality and outbreaks in the decade prior to 2020. Much of the recorded ‘increase’ in episodes reflects improved diagnostic technologies, not more frequent and more serious outbreaks.

Previous major epidemic diseases like yellow fever, influenza, and cholera continue to decline overall. The historical timeline of pandemics shows that improvements in sanitation, hygiene, potable water, antibiotics, and other forms of expanding access to good healthcare have massively reduced the morbidity and mortality of pandemics since the Spanish flu (1918–20) in which fifty million people are believed to have died.

According to Our World in Data, in the 105 years since the Spanish flu, a grand total of 10-14 million people have died in pandemics including Covid-19. To put this in perspective, in 2019 alone, nearly eight million people died from non-Covid infectious diseases. Another 41 million deaths were caused by non-communicable diseases. In the five years 2020–2024 inclusive, 7.1 million Covid-related deaths were recorded. Projecting the trendlines from 2000–2019, in the 2020–24 five years, we could have expected a total of around 35 million deaths from non-Covid infectious diseases and another 220 million from non-communicable; that is, chronic diseases.

Calculations by Leeds university’s REPPARE project also show how key claims of massive costs from pandemics are inflated whilst the costs of endemic infections are downplayed. Establishing a dedicated, treaty-based, and resource-intensive international machinery to prepare for a low-burden disease of infrequent outbreaks will distort public health priorities and divert scarce resources and finite attention from more urgent health and other goals. This is bad public policy that fails the basic test of cost-benefit analysis.

Expanded Powers and Increased Resources for the WHO

Covid saw a successful bureaucratic coup that displaced elected governments with unelected experts and technocrats as de facto policy-makers. The pandemic accords provide the WHO legal authority to declare an actual or apprehended emergency and the power thereafter to commandeer resources for itself from sovereign states and redirect resources funded by the taxpayers of one country to other states, on the basis of what the WHO chief alone considers simply a risk of potential harm.

Many governments argue that other issues like climate change, gun violence, and racism also constitute public health emergencies. These would expand the WHO’s remit even more. In addition, the pandemic treaty commits to a One Health Approach that includes animal health.

At a time of growing public disquiet about the expansion of the administrative state and its export to the world stage, the accords put in place requirements to add still more planks to the scaffolding of international health governance. These include a committee of states parties, and a technical subcommittee, to meet biennially to oversee implementation; entities to serve as a national ‘Authority’ and a ‘Focal Point’ for the implementation and coordination of health measures within countries; consultations with Indigenous populations; and yet another conference of parties (COP) that will meet every five years to review and strengthen treaty implementation.

Countries are further required to submit periodic reports on implementation measures, maintain or increase pandemic funding, and mobilise additional resources for developing countries. To this end, a coordinating financial mechanism will be established. The treaty also requires states to put in place expedited regulatory review and authorisation of pandemic-related health products, the controversies attending emergency-use authorisation of the mRNA Covid vaccines notwithstanding.

Furthermore, clauses on misinformation and disinformation will lead to censorship, once again despite the harmful and enduring legacy of this during Covid. The reality of dissent, diverse opinions, and robust scientific debate was kept hidden from the people who no longer trust governments and experts, like they largely did before Covid, to level with them. 

Jay Bhattacharya, speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington DC on 3 September as the director of the National Institutes of Health, recalled that in 2020–21, among his scientist friends, there

‘were a lot of diverse opinions. But the problem was that the scientific debate you deserved to hear in 2020 and 2021 – you were denied, because the free speech guarantees that this country normally has were taken away…The First Amendment was effectively a dead letter during the pandemic.’

The WHO believes in ‘the science of managing infodemics’ (my emphasis). Its role as a lead participant in the worldwide censorship industrial complex comprising governments, academia, legacy media, social media, and tech platforms has imposed a high cost on the WHO in eroded public trust. The core problem is mistrust, not misinformation. Managed information is not the solution. On the contrary, it will worsen the pathology.

Judgment of History

It is impossible to know how the Covid experience will be assessed by historians in the fullness of time on the criterion of informed consent, a bedrock principle of medical ethics. In a very real sense, selective and manipulated release of data ensured that informed consent was corrupted into misinformed and disinformed compliance. The steep age gradient of the mortality risk profile from the disease was known, or should have been known, by any diligent public health authority and expert. Deliberately ignoring that and the attendant strategy of policies targeted towards the high risk groups, universal fear was ramped up to off the chart on the Richter scale of panic with breathless daily press briefings on new cases, hospitalisation, deaths, and containment measures.

Absolute risk reduction was conflated with and collapsed into relative risk reduction in highlighting the ‘95 percent efficacy’ of vaccines. The same with regard to the great variability across continents. Heroic assumptions were made on the benefits of pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions as against the absolute worst-case doomsday scenarios of not going soon, hard, and long in responding to the grossly inflated threat. 

Those responsible for the irresponsible fear-mongering have not been held to account. Instead, chief health officers in charge of the pandemic response received public veneration, promotions to governorships, and high national honours, while their critics, even those whose dissenting voices have been vindicated by now, were vilified as immoral and dangerous, dismissed from service and the public square, and remain mostly sidelined.

The WHO pandemic accords were negotiated by national and international public health officials and experts who shut down societies and imposed mask and vaccine mandates. The Covid years gave them a taste of high-profile visibility and unprecedented powers to dominate the public policy and media attention and issue commands that must be obeyed for entire populations, including putting everyone under house arrest under the euphemism of ‘lockdowns.’ 

They were deferred to with great respect by prime ministers and health ministers, courted and feted by the media, and lionised and venerated by the public. The personal and career interests of the public health clerisy were best served by convincing governments and people that the frequency and severity of pandemic risks are accelerating and intensifying. Building resilience into health systems against future pandemic shocks requires more resources and powers for health bureaucrats, technocrats, and experts. 

Or did we seriously expect them to say that pandemic risks are modest and can be adequately contained by existing budgets and institutional arrangements, and then to fade softly back into the shadows of pre-Covid obscurity? To ask is to answer.