What happened at the World Health Assembly (WHA) last week? It’s worse than you think. The WHA, the governing body of the World Health Organisation (WHO), had its annual meeting in Geneva from 21 to 30 May. Not much has been reported about it but unfortunately, no news is not good news.

It was known that the WHO was making a brazen grab for more power and money through amendments to the International Health Regulations, which govern what states must do in the event of a health emergency that might cross borders, and through the negotiation of a pandemic treaty.

The idea of a pandemic treaty was dreamed up by the President of the European Council Charles Michel at a G20 Summit in 2020. It was enthusiastically endorsed by the World Economic Forum which had already partnered with the WHO to create the Covid Action Platform in March 2020 so that businesses and industry groups could shape the pandemic agenda and milk it like the cash cow that it proved to be.

It is not clear why a treaty and amended regulations are both needed or how they will work together but WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus claims the negotiations are being driven by member states. This may sound like Australia can engage directly in the process except that the negotiations have been outsourced to an Intergovernmental Negotiating Body which only has six delegates, one each from Africa, the Americas, South-East Asia, Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Western Pacific, and doesn’t include Australia.

The amendments to the International Health Regulations, which were negotiated after the first Sars outbreak in 2005, are being handled by a Working Group co-chaired by New Zealand’s former director general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield and Saudi Arabia’s Deputy Minister of Health Dr Abdullah M. Assiri.

The involvement of Bloomfield did nothing to reassure those New Zealanders who questioned the benefit of his pandemic policies, some of the most draconian in the world. Dr Assiri seems to be cut from the same cloth. Providing a progress report at a strategic roundtable at the WHA last week he said, ‘The world… requires different legal mandates, such as the pandemic treaty, to navigate through a particular pandemic, should one occur, and it will,’ and ‘prioritising actions that may restrict individual liberties… are all necessary during a pandemic’.

With these two chairing the committee, it is not surprising that the proposed amendments are sinister. Dr David Bell, an Australian public health physician who spent nine years with the WHO says they include giving the Director-General the sole power to declare a health emergency, expanding the definition of health emergencies to include those that only pose ‘potential’ harm, setting up extensive surveillance within states, requiring states to impose censorship including of things which are true but are deemed to undermine acceptance of WHO policies, and changing existing IHR provisions from non-binding to binding including with regard to border closures, travel restrictions, quarantine, medical examinations, and medication of individuals.

The draft pandemic treaty has a similarly authoritarian intent. It calls for not just a ‘whole-of-government’ approach but a ‘whole-of-society approach’ with the same censorship and limitations of human rights which are allowed so long as they are aligned with international law, which simply means so long as they are aligned with the pandemic treaty.

The treaty, if passed, will be legally binding on states who sign it. Although US Republicans have pushed back, the Biden administration has flagged that it wants to sign the treaty in 2024. In the UK, a small group of Conservative MPs has also flagged their concerns which are similar to those expressed in Australia by Liberal senators Alex Antic and Gerard Rennick, United Australia Party senator Ralph Babet and One Nation senators Malcolm Roberts and Pauline Hanson.

Unfortunately, that means that Australia would almost certainly sign off on the amended International Health Regulations and the Pandemic Treaty. Indeed, federal Labor’s Emergency Management Minister Murray Watt has already said he was ‘comfortable’ with digital censorship when it was revealed in May that the Department of Home Affairs asked social media platforms to censor posts that ‘undermined’ government policy even when the posts were factually accurate.

Yet the scope of the pandemic treaty goes far beyond the remit of the WHO because it is based on the ‘One Health Agenda’ which has emerged as a concept in international public health and links threats to health with threats to food, agriculture, livestock, animals and the environment. Accordingly, the agencies that will be covered by the treaty include the United Nations Environment Programme, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, and the UN’s World Organisation for Animal Health.

So far, so bad. But a guest appearance by US President Joe Biden’s climate envoy John Kerry confirms that the ‘One Health’ agenda is indeed, as some have suspected, about merging climate alarmism and medical tyranny.

Kerry thanked the WHO for sounding the alarm on the climate crisis saying, ‘There is no polite way to put it, the climate crisis is killing people’. Tedros agreed saying, ‘The climate crisis is a health crisis…’. So, in what is being hailed as a ‘groundbreaking move’, Mr Adnan Z. Amin, the CEO of the 2023 UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP28) which will be held in Dubai in December, announced that there will be the first-ever dedicated ‘Health Day’ with a meeting of Health and Climate Ministers.

It’s yet another illustration of Blair’s Law, coined by the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s brilliant Tim Blair as ‘the ongoing process by which the world’s multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force’. Except if the WHO gets the powers it is seeking in the pandemic treaty and the international health regulations we’ll find ourselves in a climate lockdown sooner than you can say ‘monkey-pox’!

Not so long ago, anyone who said that Covid lockdowns had so inspired the climate alarmists that the next lockdown would be to stop catastrophic global warming was branded a conspiracy theorist.

These days you can buy a tee-shirt emblazoned with the slogan: ‘I identify as a conspiracy theorist. My pronouns are… told/you/so’.