More than a decade before the onset of the global COVID pandemic, Rahm Emanuel, then chief of staff to President-Elect Barack Obama, said what is now known as “Rahm’s Rule”: “Never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” Apparently, the World Health Organization (WHO) ripped a page out of Emanuel’s playbook and ran with it when it came to the COVID-19 response.

A Power Grab in the Name of Global Health Equity

Since the WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, the world’s most recognized global health organization has been working hard behind the scenes to rebrand itself from the international health advisory council to the accepted (though unelected) global health governing authority. The WHO considers it a tremendous achievement to say that during 2020-2021, it led the largest-ever global response to a health crisis, which includes helping “galvanize the biggest, fastest and most complex vaccination drive in history.” The organization spent a whopping $1.7 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars alone to be able to take that credit. In fact, according to the Covid World Vaccination Tracker (archived by The New York Times on March 13, 2023), more than 5.55 billion people worldwide have been injected with a dose of a COVID-19 shot, equal to about 72.3% of the world population. Think about it: Almost three-fourths of the global population has been injected with a COVID mRNA shot whose effectiveness wanes by six months and does not prevent infection or transmission.

Based on those facts and others like them, such as the superiority of natural immunity over vaccine-induced immunity, pushing mass COVID vaccination around the world makes no sense, especially for young and healthy populations. But it never was about making sense for the World Health Organization. It was, and is, about control, specifically as it relates to preparing for the next pandemic. On the WHO’s COVID vaccine webpage, it states, “COVID-19 vaccines are an important tool to stop the pandemic, but they will not do so on their own. Public health and social measures such as surveillance, contact tracing, isolation and individual protective behaviors … remain essential to breaking the chain of transmission.”

Surveillance. Contact tracing. Isolation. Mass COVID vaccination in the name of global health equity among the nations. These are not the words of conspiracy theorists; they are the words of the World Health Organization itself. And it’s gearing up to make some of its biggest power moves in the next two years.

A Paradigm Shift in Public Health Initiatives

As delegates from 194 member states of the World Health Organization descend on Geneva, Switzerland, for the 76th World Health Assembly on May 21-30, 2023, the decision-making body of the WHO will discuss paradigm-shifting public health initiatives of global consequence while continuing to perfect drafts of new and existing legally binding international agreements. To achieve its one-world global health cooperative, the WHO has two parallel but distinct pathways. One is the “Pandemic Preparedness Treaty,” which is still in its “Zero Draft” phase, and the other is passing amendments to the International Health Regulations Agreement of 2005 (IHR) through a simple majority vote of member nations.

The Global Health Police State

To some, the World Health Organization’s initiatives are a welcome streamlining of what seemed like a disjointed international response to COVID. To others, however, the WHO’s ability to achieve its global health checklist is much more nefarious than that; it’s a perfectly timed post-COVID power grab that panders to the directives of Communist China and global elites, such as Bill Gates, who also happens to be one of the WHO’s greatest private donors.

As expected, there is a strong emphasis on the cooperation of all participating nation-states to fund and empower the WHO to take the leading role in directing and coordinating a global response to the next pandemic, as well as consolidating policy in all matters related to global health. In a speech at last year’s World Health Assembly, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, “We need a stronger and sustainably financed WHO, at the centre of the global health security architecture.” In other words, in Tedros’ opinion, reasons for any failure in its global response to COVID point to an underfunded, under-empowered WHO. Period, full stop.

Adopting a global pandemic accord and voting in a forthcoming batch of IHR amendments will give Tedros and the WHO the green light they need to not only set up, but also to implement a future global health police state. According to author and researcher James Roguski, the amendments to the International Health Regulations contain strong reasons to oppose them, including, but not limited to:

• Changing the nature of the WHO’s recommendations from advisory to mandatory (Article 1 and Article 42).
• Instituting a system of digital global health passports (Articles 18, 23, 24, 27, 28, 31, 35, 36, and 44).
• Expanding the WHO’s capacity to censor what it considers misinformation and disinformation (Annex 1, page 36).
• Empowering the Emergency Committee to override decisions made by sovereign nations regarding national health measures (Article 43).

From the timeline on the WHO’s website, these measures are scheduled to be voted on at the World Health Assembly in 2024. All 194 member nations should be more than a little concerned about the impact these legally binding international agreements would have on their own national public health sovereignty despite what pundits say to the contrary. And while, during the 2022 World Health Assembly, it was several African countries, along with Iran and Malaysia, that objected to U.S.-led reforms to the IHR, the WHO hopes to win them over in the near future with promises of universal health care and health equity for all. To help accomplish these objectives, the WHO launched a massive new database featuring 11 million data points pulled from 15 global statistics sources to collect and store more information on global health inequity. What could go wrong?

Bowing the Knee to the WHO

In the meantime, the Biden White House is firmly committed to advancing pandemic preparedness abroad through strengthening the WHO and standing in support of “targeted” changes to the IHR amendments and spearheading a future international pandemic accord. If both the IHR Amendments and the Pandemic Preparedness Accord pass next year in Geneva, virtually all the world will be taking its health directives from an unelected global organization outside the authority of sovereign nation-states.

The problem in the United States of America right now is that the current administration is not only willing and eager to bow the knee to the directives of the WHO but is leading the way in convincing the rest of the world to do the same.

Annemarie McLean is a writer for Liberty Counsel, a nationwide public interest civil liberties law firm committed to restoring the culture, advancing religious freedom, protecting the unborn, and strengthening the family. In 2012, she founded 3D Missions, an international outreach taking the Gospel to the nations through the performing arts, and co-founded Brave & Beautiful, a platform empowering young women to live, love, and lead courageously. She holds a journalism degree from Oral Roberts University, with post-graduate work in organizational leadership at Palm Beach Atlantic University.