Carefully examining parts of the Pandemic Treaty draft published today
Here is the draft. I have copied some of the parts I found most interesting, and I discuss why, below.
If it does not come up, try linking from the Politico article here, where it was uploaded.
The yellow highlights indicate areas still to be resolved.
Note below that the Pandemic Treaty will not only apply to pandemics but will apply at all times!
Note further that dignity, human rights and fundamental freedom of persons is explicitly included, while at first it was removed from the amended IHR. However, the drafters are still trying to fool us. They claim to respect international humanitarian law, but what is that, really? You would have to be a lawyer to know. It is the law of war and ought not to be included here.
The nations have not agreed on how the global south will receive the benefits promised to them initially. No one wants to be on the hook for paying for them. Pharma does not want to share its know-how to enable local production of meds or vaccines.
Below is a lot of fluffy language that is actually designed to support emergency authorization or other methods of reduced drug/vaccine regulation (without full testing or licensure) under cover of an emergency, so that experimental products can be rolled out on entire populations.
WHO has become a drug/vaccine licensing entity (“prequalifier”) and I was told it used Bill Gates’ staff to do some of this work, so beware this method of fake licensure.
There is also an effort to harmonize regulatory standards internationally: “align… regulatory requirements” which will arguably drop regulation to a low standard.
Here I am happy to see that nations can now leave the treaty after one year, not three, as in earlier drafts. Thank you to a reader for pointing out my error. NO ONE can leave the pandemic treaty until 3 years have gone by, minimum. But after two years in, at any time thereafter it will only take a year to get out.
Remember that dues to belong to the WHO and the treaty are going to be very high, given the loss of the US and hits to GAVI and CEPI, which are major donors. The May WHA meeting will have to deal with raising the WHO dues.
The cost of complying with the Treaty is never mentioned in the Treaty. Pages 24-25 do a lot of hand-waving about finding new sustainable financing and moving money from elsewhere into the Treaty, but no serious discussion of funding is included. Recall that this Treaty was sold to the global South as the North paying them to do better surveillance so diseases could be stopped within their borders. Well, that never played out, has it?
Small sums have been provided for nations of the South to conduct One Health exercises as a teaser during the negotiations. I don’t see that continuing.
This section is designed to ease in the EU as a signatory, to enable it gradually to take over from all its member states wrt future negotiations of the treaty—even though the EU is not a member of the WHO.
It will now come into force one month after 60 nations have ratified the treaty, whereas previously the drafts asked for 30 and then 40 nations only to ratify before it came into force.
