The "Pandemic Treaty" is unconstitutional
Even the Senate has no authority to approve this madness
There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth in conservative circles over the past week about the “WHO convention, agreement or other international instrument on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response” (the “WHO CA+”) a draft World Health Organization “Pandemic Treaty.” The Left says it’s not a treaty and the president can sign it without Senate approval. Conservatives argue it’s a treaty that must go through the Senate.
Conservatives are making a mistake, however, in drawing the line at Senate approval. This puts the ball too deep in our own territory. Before even getting to the question of Senate approval, conservatives should push back hard on whether our federal government has the power to exercise control over the delivery of health care, even in a pandemic, much less the authority to hand over such power to a foreign body.
The Constitution does not delegate the power to regulate health care to the federal government. That power is reserved to the states and the people. Any effort to hand a supervisory role over health care to a worldwide body is an attempt to delegate power the federal government never had in the first place. Such a move would be unconstitutional.
The counterargument is that the WHO CA+ is for the extraordinary case of a worldwide pandemic which would require a unified global response. Heaven forbid we’re not prepared for the next virus! This argument fails for several reasons.
First off, aren’t these pandemics supposed be once in a century events? The last big one was the Spanish Influenza of 1918. How many of you were stunned to be living through a worldwide pandemic, one for the history books, but with the silver-lining thought, “Hey, once we’re through this at least it’ll be out of the way and we won’t have to worry about the next big one for a century or so?” We had our pandemic. We shouldn’t be running around like Henny Pennies acting as if the next one is right around the corner.
Second, a brief look at some of the terms of The WHO CA+ puts the lie to the idea that this is really about future pandemics.
The “Vision” statement near the top of the draft agreement states: “The WHO CA+1 aims for a world where pandemics are effectively controlled to protect present and future generations from pandemics and their devastating consequences, and to advance the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health for all peoples, on the basis of equity, human rights and solidarity, with a view to achieving universal health coverage . . . (emphasis added).
So the WHO gives away the game at the outset by telling us this is really about socialism — wealth redistribution to achieve universal health care. But it gets even better.
Article 4 (Guiding Rights and Principles), of the WHO CA+ articulates a utopian “right to health.” This means, “The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health, defined as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of age, race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition” (emphasis added). So if the United States signs up we are committing to a new fundamental right that, presumably, would mean some combination of personal trainers and prescription drugs for everyone who is not in a “state of complete physical, mental and social well being.” This is preposterous.
And just how much will all this cost? Well, the opening bid for a signatory to the WHO CA+ is to allocate “not lower than 5% of its current health expenditure to pandemic prevention, preparedness, response and health systems recovery, notably for improving and sustaining relevant capacities and working to achieve universal health coverage . . . .” It’s right there in Article 19 (Sustainable and predictable financing). So check your health care premiums and add another 5% for starters to cover pandemic prevention and global universal health care!
Finally, and most importantly, a unified global response to the next pandemic is the last thing the world needs. What we need is a response rooted in the American model of local sovereignty.
The default position should be that the power resides with the people. Give people access to information and let them use their own common sense to figure out how best to protect themselves and their loved ones. Generally people act in ways that tend to reduce mortality, with a notable exception being when they are commandeered by governments to wage war.
If an outbreak is so bad that it requires government intervention, let local and state governments take action to protect the people. If the world takes uniform action to deal with the next pandemic, what happens if that uniform response is wrong? It’s better to let various communities, states and regions work out their own best responses and let the most successful ones serve as examples for others to emulate.
Elon Musk made this point when he spoke to the World Government Summit last month. He said:
I think we should be maybe a little bit concerned about actually becoming too much of a single world government. If I may say, we want to avoid creating a civilizational risk by having—frankly, this might sound a little odd—too much cooperation between governments. . . . All throughout history, civilizations have risen and fallen. But it hasn’t meant the doom of humanity as a whole because there have been all these separate civilizations that were separated by great distances. . . . It sounds a little odd, but we want to have some amount of civilizational diversity such that if something does go wrong with some part of civilization, then the whole thing doesn’t just collapse and humanity keeps moving forward.
For the sake of sovereignty at home and humanity all over the globe, we must resist the push for uniform global responses to crises engineered by elites and self-described experts.