An urgent call is being made for the government to respond to concerns about the World Health Organisation (WHO) pandemic treaty, which is expected to be adopted by 194 UN Member States, including Jamaica, on May 27 this year during the World Health Assembly (WHA).
The Jamaica Coalition for a Healthy Society (JCHS) is among those that have warned the government that Jamaica could be ceding its authority to the international group by adopting the international treaty. However, the JCHS is yet to get a response to letters that were sent to Prime Minister Andrew Holness on May 16, 2022, and April 3, 2023, which were also copied to the opposition leader, Mark Golding.
“The treaty involves handing over our sovereignty to people who have conducted themselves in a manner that we can’t trust them. It is bad to give away your sovereignty, and it’s double bad to give away your sovereignty to people who are not trustworthy,” chairman of the Coalition, Dr. Wayne West, told Freedom Come Rain recently.
Thousands of Japanese citizens gathered on April 13 in Tokyo for a series of rallies to protest the WHO pandemic treaty. The estimated 19,000 protestors strongly voiced their opposition to mandatory vaccination and called for Japan to withdraw from the WHO. The protesters also criticised the lack of accountability for the steep rise in “vaccine”-linked deaths and echoed concerns that WHO was being empowered at the expense of Japan’s national sovereignty in preparations for a new “pandemic.”
Similar sentiments have been shared by citizens in other countries, including the US, Canada, and sections of Europe. Those opposing their governments adopting the treaty include doctors, public health experts, civil society groups, journalists, online influencers, and politicians.
The 194 WHO Member States started negotiating the international accord more than two years ago, coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the WHO, the agreement is aimed at ensuring countries are better equipped to deal with the next health catastrophe or to prevent it altogether. The plan is to seal the agreement at the 2024 World Health Assembly, the WHO’s decision-making body.
According to the WHO, the pandemic treaty is expected to improve prevention, preparedness, and response to future pandemics at a global level. Once agreed, the instrument will be legally binding and rooted in the WHO constitution.
The WHO has been severely criticised for its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Vaccine mandates and lockdowns were implemented by the governments of several Member States with the hope of curtailing the spread of the virus. WHO is now 80% financed by private donors and 20% by member state contributions. The Bill Gates Foundation is currently its second-biggest donor, second only to the US. Some critics are of the view that Gates influences the decisions of the international health organisation.
In the April 3, 2023 letter to Holness and Golding, Dr. West noted that the fact that WHO is central to the execution of the response to a pandemic is concerning.
“The WHO has not shown itself to be trustworthy in the COVID-19 pandemic. There is no evidence that countries that followed WHO’s advice did better than those that did not,” he asserted.
Added to this, he said, is the inordinate influence that major financial contributors to the WHO appear to have in its policymaking. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was specifically referenced. Dr. West believes the public should be made aware of the treaty and the international concerns.
The rights and freedoms of citizens worldwide were drastically curtailed as governments followed global recommendations to deal with the pandemic. Several Jamaicans lost their jobs or were threatened that they could be fired because they refused to take the jab. Even those who cited medical reasons for not complying with their company’s vaccine mandates were penalised. Based on recent media reports, two workers at Kings House, the Governor General of Jamaica’s residence, have been off the job since October 2021 due to their failure to provide COVID-19 test results.
Discussions about the pandemic accord come at a time when there is a bird flu outbreak in the US. The WHO also recently released a statement expressing concern about the rising number of bird flu (H5NI) cases in humans. US authorities reported this month that a person in Texas was recovering from bird flu after being exposed to dairy cattle.
WHO’s chief scientist, Jeremy Farrar, told reporters last Thursday in Geneva that the spread of the virus within several mammal species, including domestic cattle in the US, has increased the risk of spillover to humans.
“The great concern, of course, is that in…infecting ducks and chickens and then increasingly mammals, that virus now evolves and develops the ability to infect humans and then, critically, the ability to go from human to human,” he said.
While there has been no evidence that H5N1 is spreading between humans, there have been hundreds of cases where humans have been infected through contact with animals over the past 20 years. Farrar noted that the mortality rate is extraordinarily high among humans because of the lack of natural immunity to the virus. There have been 889 cases and 463 deaths caused by H5N1 worldwide between 2003 and 2024. These cases were reported in 23 countries.
Efforts are currently underway towards the development of vaccines and therapeutics for H5N1.