On April 17, the Geneva-based news platform Health Politcy Watch published a new draft of the WHO pandemic treaty dated April 2024. It replaces the previous draft from March 13, 2024. It was sent to governments on April 16 and is to be discussed at the last meeting of the INB negotiating body from April 29 to May 10. If it is accepted, it will be put to a vote at the World Health Assembly from May 27 to June 1. If again accepted, it will be up to the member states, or in Europe possibly also the EU, to ratify it.
The March draft had already made an attempt to make the totalitarian ambitions of the treaty less visible by removing some signal words. The current draft continues along this path.
Here are the new and the old text of Article 18. First the new draft text, with additions from March in bold:
“Article 18. Communication and public awareness
1. The Parties shall strengthen science, public health and pandemic literacy in the population, as well as access to transparent, accurate, science- and evidence-informed information on pandemics and their causes, impacts and drivers, particularly through risk-communication and effective community level engagement.
2. The Parties shall, as appropriate, conduct research to inform policies on factors that hinder or strengthen adherence to public health and social measures in a pandemic and trust in science and public health institutions, authorities and agencies.”
The March draft read as follows (text that has been eliminated in the April draft highlighted in bold and italics by me):
“Article 18. Communication and public awareness
1. Each Party shall promote timely access to credible and evidence-based information on pandemics and their causes, effects and drivers, with the aim of countering and addressing misinformation or disinformation, particularly through risk communication and effective community-level engagement.
2. The Parties shall, as appropriate, promote and/or conduct research and inform policies on factors that hinder or strengthen adherence to public health and social measures in a pandemic, as well as trust in science and public health institutions and agencies.
3. The Parties shall promote and apply science- and evidence-based approaches to effective and timely risk assessment, and culturally appropriate public communications.
4. The Parties shall exchange information and cooperate, in accordance with national law, in preventing misinformation and disinformation, and endeavour to develop best practices to increase the accuracy and reliability of crisis communications.”
With the March draft, the word “infodemic” had already been deleted from Article 18. “Combating” misinformation and disinformation had become the more harmless-sounding “countering” them.
In the new draft, these two signal words have now also been removed. As paragraph 4 has been deleted, the signatory states no longer explicitly undertake to work together to prevent misinformation and disinformation. And where paragraph 1 refers to the provision of credible and evidence-based information on pandemics and their consequences, the new draft no longer mentions the goal of countering disinformation.
The coronavirus pandemic has, however, shown that even without the pandemic treaty, the international coordination of exaggerated fear-mongering and vaccination propaganda – organized mainly from the USA – has worked extremely well. It is worth remembering Event 201, the inflated death and infection figures of the Johns Hopkins University Corona Dashborard, which were adopted and aggressively propagated throughout the Western world, and the fact that the core messages of the global vaccination campaigns about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines and the incitement of hatred towards the unvaccinated were formulated and tested in large-scale psychological laboratory experiments at Yale University in July 2020, long before any vaccines had been developed,
By deleting paragraph 4, the creators of the pandemic treaty (primarily the US government) are thus merely refraining from obliging countries outside their direct sphere of influence to join this propaganda system. This is not entirely insignificant, but is of no importance to us.
The deleted mention of the objective of combating disinformation in paragraph 1 is replaced by the obligation to “strengthen science, public health and pandemic literacy in the population.” This can – and certainly is intended to – amount to the same thing. Ultimately, it is based on the same totalitarian view that there is THE science and that authorities can determine what is true and what is false. What is true is what the WHO determines promotes “public health and the pandemic competence of the population”.
The deletion of paragraph 4, which (veiledly) made the use of behavioral science for the (manipulative) design of health communication mandatory, does not do any harm to the totalitarian cause, because the WHO members have already adopted a voluntary commitment of this content by resolution at the World Health Assembly 2023.
Paragraph 3 was also deleted. It was intended to oblige states to “apply science- and evidence-based approaches to culturally appropriate crisis communication.” This was also rendered unnecessary by the aforementioned resolution of 2023. And there remains paragraph 2, which obliges states to “investigate which policies in a pandemic hinder or strengthen the population’s compliance with public health measures and their “trust in science, and public health institutions, authorities and facilities.” The “authorities” have been added to this paragraph. This makes any criticism of the government in a pandemic the subject of countermeasures based on propaganda science and plain old censorship.
Conclusion
Taken together with the 2023 resolution on the use of behavioral science, the content and intent of the latest draft of the treaty remain the same, they are just a bit better disguised. The efforts to conceal the true intentions show that the public protests are heard, even if they are not truely taken into account.
Note: In the interest of providing quick information about this new draft – for which the established media apparently do not feel responsible – I will limit myself to this aspect in this article. You should find out more about the new draft on this blog in the next few days.
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