New Jersey Representative Chris Smith (R) announced Monday he will chair a congressional hearing on the Biden administration’s push to enter into an international pandemic treaty that could cede U.S. sovereignty to the World Health Organization (WHO).
“Under absolutely no circumstances should the Biden Administration surrender American sovereignty to the World Health Organization and allow the voice of the American people and consent of the governed to be subjugated to dictates of an agenda-driven global administrative bureaucracy,” said Smith, chair of the House Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations Subcommittee.
As The Star News Network reported, Smith first addressed the issue of the pandemic treaty in May 2022 when the Biden administration offered its own proposal granting new unilateral authority over its healthcare policies to WHO Director-General Tedros.
“The American people have a right to know exactly what the Biden Administration is negotiating at the WHO, especially as the President remains silent and fails to reassure us that he will protect our Constitution from bureaucrats at this troubled United Nations body,” said Smith, who added he is chairing the hearing to allow Americans an opportunity for “greater public scrutiny and much-needed transparency to the Biden Administration’s aggressive efforts to enter this new accord with the WHO, which took disastrous missteps during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
In February, Brett Schaefer and Steven Groves, both Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom fellows, wrote that the WHO’s “zero draft” of its new pandemic treaty is “significantly flawed.”
Observing that despite the WHO’s “failure during COVID-19 and complicity in China’s cover-up,” the UN’s global health agency has drafted a new pandemic treaty, one that the Heritage authors said would still “dramatically expand WHO authority to declare a pandemic and, thereby, trigger provisions in the treaty that would re-allocate resources and encourage governments to waive intellectual property rights.”
Specifically, the Heritage authors noted:
If the U.S. joined the treaty, it would be required to increase its domestic funding by “allocating in its annual budgets not lower than 5% of its current health expenditure to pandemic prevention,” resulting in the annual expenditure of tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars on treaty compliance.
“The draft treaty focuses on expanding WHO power, trampling intellectual property rights, and ‘equitably’ redistributing knowledge, technology, and other resources,” Schaefer and Groves wrote. “The U.S. should not join this treaty as drafted and Congress must ensure that the Administration does not circumvent Senate approval on any treaty.”
Smith said the hearing will be part of his “ongoing full-court press” for answers after Biden Secretary of State Antony Blinken failed to respond to specific concerns Smith raised at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on March 23rd.
“The zero-draft WHO pandemic treaty starts off with very harsh criticism of the United States and the international community by calling it a ‘catastrophic failure of the international community in showing solidarity and equity in response to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic,’” Smith observed, detailing further:
Article 4 of the treaty pays lip service to sovereignty and then completely overcomes that lip service by saying, “provided that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to their peoples and other countries,” which empowers the WHO to step in and prescribe what each country would do.”
Article 10 says that the United States would be obligated to provide 20 percent of our medical supplies—including tests, vaccines, medications and the like—to the WHO. They would say “we want it, you have to provide it.”
“My colleagues and I look forward to having the Biden Administration address these grave concerns that have rightfully alarmed many American citizens including me,” said Smith.
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Susan Berry, PhD, is national education editor at The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected]
Background Photo “World Health Organization Building” by Yann Forget. CC BY-SA 3.0.
