International Public Health is Sick: Who Can Heal It?

Here is your summary article on the COVID response and the WHO

Professor Reginald Oduor is an academic who does what the academy is supposed to do: Read widely, master a subject, then explain it to the rest of us with links to the references that support his statements, so that a complex subject can be grasped by others.

So few academics appear to go through this process in an evenhanded way, so that the entire concept of expertise as something different from jumping on a bandwagon has been called into question.

Professor Oduor has accomplished this feat in an article describing the history, legality, ethics (etc.) of the WHO’s IHR amendments, Pandemic Agreement. While it is a summary that does not contain extraneously detail, it does have a great deal of information packed into it. It is a really good synopsis also of the COVID era’s history. Definitely worth a look.

And he makes me think twice about jettisoning the Academy in its entirety.

International Public Health is Sick: Who Can Heal It?

Public health refers to efforts to create conditions that promote the overall well-being of populations. It therefore entails measures such as the provision of clean water, efficient waste disposal systems, and even road safety. It is thus distinguished from medical care by the fact that the latter focuses on the doctor-patient relationship. Nevertheless, the ethical principles of public health mitigations presume the ethical principles of medical care such as commitment to promoting the patient’s highest good and protecting his/her privacy.

“Censorship” refers to any action intended to thwart the expression and dissemination of certain views and thus to influence public opinion in the direction preferred by the person engaging in it. Governments typically enforce censorship by promoting a culture of fear through threats, arrests, prosecutions, detentions without trial, and even forced disappearances and murders. Such measures also often result in people becoming accomplices of the censorship by urging each other to stay silent to avoid getting into trouble. In “Anatomy of Censorship in the COVID-19 Era”, I pointed out that with the advent of COVID-19, several measures have been deployed to promote censorship, including intimidation through distortion of science, the silencing of dissent on social media, surveillance, and propaganda. Besides, those expressing views that question official positions have been denied financial services (“de-banking”), their social media accounts have been closed (“de-platforming”), and their public appearances boycotted (“cancelling”). Besides, medical doctors with dissenting views about the COVID-19 public health protocols have had their practising licences withdrawn. It is noteworthy that while such measures are not as openly deployed as they were in 2020 to 2022, many of those who were subjected to them are yet to see the restitution that they evidently deserve.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, propaganda is the deliberate dissemination of facts, arguments, rumours, half-truths, or lies to influence public opinion. With the advent of COVID-19, sustained propaganda was deployed to reinforce censorship. Those who questioned official narratives about the effectiveness of the COVID-19 protocols were labelled as “conspiracy theorists”, “anti-science”, and spreaders of “misinformation” and “disinformation”, among others. Those who declined the COVID-19 “vaccines” were accused of being unmindful about other people’s welfare, and even of exposing the vaccinated to danger (a tacit admission that the “vaccines” were ineffective). Besides, articles were published in hitherto credible academic journals to reinforce official lines, the most notorious of which was the now infamous “Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” in the journal Nature Medicine, which advanced the now discredited view that “SARS-CoV-2 [the virus that causes COVID-19] is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”

The unwarranted expansion of public health through the “one-health” approach

The so-called one health approach, embraced by both the WHO’s amendments to the IHRs and the Pandemic Agreement, is based on the view that the health of people, domestic animals, wildlife and the integrity of ecosystems are all so interconnected that they must be addressed jointly. While this sounds commonsensical due to the interdependence of various life forms, it is dangerous when pushed beyond reasonable limits, because it can be used to degrade human dignity by equating the value of human life to that of other life forms – a view already being promoted by proponents of deep ecology. Indeed, the One Health Initiative website declares: “One Health Initiative will unite human and veterinary medicine.”

Besides, the “one-health” approach can easily feed into the definition of “health” in the WHO’s Constitution as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. While this definition might appear holistic, it can be used to justify the WHO’s intervention in a wide range of issues such as military conflicts, noise pollution, marital dissatisfaction, road safety, or environmental pollution, among many others, thereby expanding its mandate to cover almost every aspect of human life in the guise of promoting public health.

Indeed, at the present time, the WHO’s definition of “health” is being used to reinforce the message of the corporatized environmental movement whose aim is the so-called Net-Zero, which ScienceDirect defines as “a state in which greenhouse gas emissions are balanced by the amount removed or eliminated, aiming for a decarbonized economy by 2050”. Thus, health freedom advocates are concerned that at one point the WHO might advocate for climate lockdowns along the same lines that it overtly or covertly advocated for COVID-19 restrictions, thereby again harming the most vulnerable in society while the middle class “works from home”.

Unprocedural adoption of amendments to the WHO’s International Health Regulations

On 1 June 2024, the WHO’s 77^th World Health Assembly (WHA) voted in favour of Amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHRs) through Resolution WHA77.17 amidst protests from health freedom advocates. As I explained elsewhere, the WHO’s own rules in Article 55 of the International Health Regulations (2005) require that state parties be accorded a minimum of four months to consider any proposed amendments to the Regulations. This meant that in the run-up to the 77^th WHA which commenced on 27 May 2024, the deadline for the WHO Director-General to submit such proposals to the WHO’s member states was 27 January 2024. However, as Dr Silvia Behrendtexplains, “A new official version was first published on 17 April 2024, containing numerous previously unknown provisions. Further changes followed in a May 20, 2024 version and finally in the adopted June 1^st version – none of which were properly notified within the required time… Even the Who Secretariat previously acknowledged that without a final draft by end of January, only a status report – not a vote – should occur.”

In the run-up to the 77^th WHA, David Bell, Silvia Behrendt, Amrei Muller, Thi Thuy Van Dinh & others wrote an Open Letter to the WHO point out in the Terms of Reference (para.6) of the IHR Review Committee (2022), the deadline for the Working Group on the International Health Regulations (WGIHR) to submit a draft set of amendments for state parties to consider was set at January 2024 in line with Article 55(2) of the IHRS. They further observed that although the draft WHO Pandemic Agreement and amendments to the IHRs contained significant health, economic and human rights implications, they were being negotiated unprocedurally by various committees.

Furthermore, the authors of the Open Letter to the WHO observed that the draft amendments to the IHRs had been developed with unusual haste on the premise that due to “climate change”, there was a rapidly increasing urgency to mitigate pandemic risk caused by transmission of pathogens from animals to humans (“zoonotic diseases”). This, they pointed out, was despite the fact that the alleged high risk of a pandemic in the short-to-medium term had been shown to be contradicted by the data and citations on which WHO and other agencies had relied. The position of the authors of the Open Letter to the WHO was fortified by a University of Leeds report which illustrated that the risk of such zoonotic diseases is not growing, and may even be lower than before, but the impression is easily created of heightened risk due to great improvements in technology for detecting infections (“diagnostic capability”).

Thus, there is broad agreement among health freedom advocates that the adoption of the amendments to the IHRs on 1 June 2024 was an instance of gross violation of procedural justice, as it placed at a serious disadvantage countries with limited resources requisite for an adequate interrogation of the amendments before the vote. Other health freedom advocates have misgivings beyond the violation of Article 55 (2) of the IHR (2005). For example, according to Dr Behrendt, there were violations of voting procedures for the amendments to the IHRs at the 77^th WHA, including lack of transparency, lack of quorum verification, and non-compliance with essential rules. However, other health freedom advocates with whom I have spoken insist that the only violation has to do with Article 55 (2) of the IHR (2005).

Questions about negotiations for the WHO’s Pandemic Agreement

According to a WHO News Release, the WHO’s 78^th World Health Assembly (WHA) adopted the Pandemic Agreement by consensus (rather than by a vote) on 20 May 2025. In an earlier News Release of 16 April 2025, the WHO had announced that its International Negotiating Body (INB) had reached consensus on a draft Pandemic Agreement. In that News Release, the WHO was emphatic that several matters against which health freedom advocates had been agitating throughout the COVID-19 era were excluded from the draft:

The proposal affirms the sovereignty of countries to address public health matters within their borders, and provides that nothing in the draft agreement shall be interpreted as providing WHO any authority to direct, order, alter or prescribe national laws or policies, or mandate States to take specific actions, such as ban or accept travellers, impose vaccination mandates or therapeutic or diagnostic measures or implement lockdowns.

However, some health freedom advocates hold that the negotiations for the Pandemic Agreement have also been shot through with violations of procedure. Article 19 of the WHO’s Constitution states:

The Health Assembly shall have authority to adopt conventions or agreements with respect to any matter within the competence of the Organization. A two-third vote of the Health Assembly shall be required for the adoption of such conventions or agreements, which shall come into force for each member when accepted by it in accordance with its constitutional processes.

In early 2024, the WHO released a revised draft of the Pandemic Agreement dated 13 March 2024, less than three months before the 77^th WHA in which it was to be considered, again to the disadvantage of poorly resourced countries. Besides, Dr Silvia Behrendt explains that in the run-up to the 78^th WHA, it became publicly known that the WHO Secretariat intended to get the draft Pandemic Agreement adopted through consensus rather than through the formal voting procedures outlined in Article 19 of the WHO’s Constitution, prompting Prime Minister Robert Fico of the Slovak Republic to call for the WHO to adhere to legal procedure and ensure a formal vote. According to Reuters, a statement by Prime Minister Fico said that the WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had called him and asked him not to demand a vote. If this is true, it is a gross violation of the right of a sovereign state to contribute to the WHA deliberations as it deems fit. Said Prime Minister Fico: “I reiterated that the Slovak delegation is bound by the Slovak government’s instructions to demand a vote on the pandemic treaty.” Reuters further reports that there was no immediate response from the WHO on Fico’s statement.

Another health freedom advocate, Dr Meryl Nass, is equally unhappy with the way in which the Pandemic Agreement was adopted at the 78^th WHA. She writes:

…, on day 1 of the World Health Assembly (WHA), its Committee A voted to accept the draft of the Pandemic Treaty that had been ironed out by the International Negotiating Body, and present it to the full WHA for adoption. (The WHO always creates committees whose names don’t identify their purpose, similar to how it changes the names of its treaties.)

Early the next morning, before the members could talk among themselves about the BioHub or other matters, the WHO bureaucracy put the Pandemic Agreement in front of the entire WHA, where a “consensus” agreed to adopt it.

I am not adequately acquainted with the role of Committee A as distinct from that of the full WHA, but Article 19 of the WHO Constitution does not make provisions for the adoption of a treaty by consensus, but only by a two-thirds majority. Besides, I would have thought that the plenary of the 78th WHA, rather than that of Committee A, should have been the forum for a final vote.

In sum, a number of health freedom advocates hold that the WHO Secretariat created a sense of urgency in the negotiations for both the amendments to the IHRs and the Pandemic Agreement, and then went on to violate requisite procedures in the guise of responding to the purported urgency. This might also explain why the draft Pandemic Agreement released on Wednesday 16 April 2025 was clearly incomplete, with Articles 8, 15, 16 and 34 missing from it, and with two versions of Article 13. However, other health freedom advocates with whom I have spoken insist that while there was a clear violation of Article 55 (2) of the IHR with regard to how the 77^th WHA processed amendments to the IHR in 2024, there was nothing substantively unprocedural about the way in which the 78^th WHA adopted the Pandemic Agreement.

The WHO has indicated that its next focus is the negotiations for an annexe to the Pandemic Agreement on a Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) system. The system is to be designed to facilitate the sharing of pathogens with “pandemic potential”, purportedly to enable pharmaceutical companies to develop “vaccines” in good time while sharing the profits they derive from the “vaccines” with the states that shared the pathogens with them. However, the University of Leeds report which I earlier referred to points out that such a system is actually unnecessary, as the risk of pandemics due to animal-to-human transmission is much lower than the WHO and its associates claim. Besides, health freedom advocates are pointing out that since the annexe must be negotiated before the Pandemic Agreement is opened for signatures and ratifications, the 78^th WHA actually voted for an incomplete document to help the WHO save face, and that this, too, was unprocedural.

Conclusion

It would be irresponsible for humanity to get by without addressing the need to prevent and/or mitigate the spread of infectious diseases around the world. However, this does not call for the kind of top-down changes we have seen in the field of public health over the past few decades. What is needed are context-specific interventions by sovereign states coupled with co-operation across borders and continents that respect the sovereignty of the individual by upholding human rights and the sovereignty of states by respecting each state’s right to conduct its internal affairs without interference from external entities. After all, the UN, of which the WHO is a specialized body, claims to be committed to democratic principles in line with its Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Clearly, international public health is desperately sick: who can heal it? An adequately informed and deeply engaged citizenry can give it a try.