Tiffany Pandemic Treaty Bill Clears House

Wisconsin U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany’s legislation requiring any negotiated agreement between the U.S. government and the World Health Organization to be considered a treaty subject to Senate ratification has passed the U.S. House of Representatives.

Now it’s headed to the U.S. Senate, where it will die an inglorious death (ditto for Sen. Ron Johnson’s identical bill over there).

That’s not to say Tiffany’s effort is futile or unimportant. Quite the contrary. In chambers where most bills either reinforce the status quo or simply represent that day’s legislative version of word salad, this bill is most important, just not in the way most people think.

Specifically, as the World Health Organization (WHO) tries to revive its pandemic preparedness treaty (bogged down since May), which would bind signatory nations to a response plan giving the WHO massive power, Tiffany’s “No WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty Without Senate Approval Act” would require any such convention, agreement, or other international instrument to be considered a treaty subject to the constitutional requirements of advice and consent of the Senate, with two-thirds of senators concurring.

The bill cleared the House 219-199, with four Democrats leaping from the globalist ship to join conservatives in standing up for U.S. sovereignty.

That any such international agreement should be considered a treaty is a no-brainer outside the gilded walls of the Democratic Party, where bureaucratic consensus is seen as the truest form of populism. After all, both the Paris Climate Agreement and the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (aka the Iran nuclear deal) were pawned off as merely “executive agreements” not requiring Senate approval.

And here we are again.

What Would the WHO Treaty Would Mean for America

The vote hasn’t received too much attention in the corporate media, as might be expected. It should be getting a lot of attention, though, and for three big reasons. First, as Tiffany points out, the proposed treaty drafts explicitly assert that world governance institutions such as the WHO trump national governments; second, they surrender U.S. based intellectual property rights and proprietary technology to other nations; and, finally, they redistribute wealth to China and the developing world—all before there is any so-called pandemic.

If that isn’t bad enough, the treaty would legitimize the ongoing transfer of political power to those international bureaucracies, and, worst of all, establish the legal justification for intertwining local, state, and federal bureaucracies into one parallel governing structure—a bureaucratic government set apart from, and more powerful than, elected governments.

One of the conservative critiques of the WHO’s proposed binding pandemic agreement is that it gives the WHO too much explicit power, including enabling the WHO secretary-general to declare a global pandemic, which triggers many of the sovereign-killing provisions. The WHO would also have the authority to coordinate medical supply chains to ensure “equity” in their distribution among member nations, though member nations quibble over the details.

What’s more, the WHO could recruit the CDC and other national health agencies to help fight its war against “misinformation,” in other words, to lead its efforts to shut down any questioning of the government’s narratives.

The liberal pushback against those who oppose Tiffany’s treaty legislation is that the WHO cannot enforce compliance with any international convention that undermines our national security. If the U.S. was so threatened, progressives counterpunch, the U.S. could just ignore the treaty and refuse to abide by its terms. Who is going to stop us?

That’s true enough as far as it goes, but it is way too simplistic a take. As mentioned above, if any version of this treaty goes into effect, the damage will be done long before any pandemic is declared, because the treaty would establish a pipeline for the ongoing redistribution of wealth and knowledge as part of the “preparation” for a pandemic. Indeed, the latest drafts focus of pre-emergency resource allocation, not on brute authority during an emergency.

That’s why it’s called a pandemic preparedness treaty, with the emphasis on preparedness. Even worse, the ensuing vertical integration of local, state, federal and international bureaucracies that the treaty requires would complete the creation of a de facto stand-alone world government. The consolidation of bureaucratic collectivist power in the hands of the unelected would be a fait accompli, and it would be official U.S. public policy.

The problem is, one does not surrender—whether on a battleship in the Pacific or at Appomattox Court House or at the WHO headquarters in Geneva—then wink at your fellow citizens that you are not really surrendering, that you can just take it back any time you want to.

Surrender is surrender, and it signals to the people that they must too.

Why Tom Tiffany Stepped In

Enter Tom Tiffany and his important legislation. In introducing and supporting the bill, Tiffany himself went to the heart of why this legislation needs to be taken seriously—its pushback that international governance is to be trusted with our sovereign power.

Not least, such distrust in international institutions is an important political issue, if only conservatives will harness it the way progressives are using Project 2025. As Tiffany told me a few weeks back, the issue has traction among the grassroots. The congressman said he heard about it repeatedly from constituents as he made his recent rounds in his sprawling northern Wisconsin district.

That should be surprising to no one. Because of the pandemic, the WHO is no longer the obscure United Nations agency it once once, and, unfortunately for them, they are on the losing end of that bargain. Where once people saw it as a mostly benign do-gooder agency—billboards demanding that the U.S. get out of the United Nations usually were found only in the Deep South—its pandemic failures changed public opinion significantly.

As Tiffany’s legislation itself points out, a Pew Research Center survey conducted in April and May 2020 indicated that 51 percent of Americans felt that WHO had done a poor or fair job in managing the Covid–19 pandemic. President Donald Trump ramped up the public relations stakes even higher later that year when the administration notified the United Nations of its decision to withdraw from the WHO, for any number of reasons, including obstructionist delays in informing member states about the Wuhan outbreak; and absurdly false claims about the transmissibility of the virus.

That withdrawal would have taken effect on July 6, 2021, had Biden not canceled it. The partisan divide elevates the public stakes, and for good reason because, as Tiffany points out, the proposed treaty is a line in the political sand. Indeed, Senate ratification of any pandemic treaty is the only tether between a massive international bureaucracy presiding over international and national public health mandates and the people, the only thing that preserves the power of the elected over the unelected.

Beyond the political ramifications, in a speech on the House floor, Tiffany outlined the more immediate and direct threats the treaty poses to sovereignty, despite the heated denials from progressives.

“Who do you want in charge of a pandemic policy in the United States” Tiffany asked. “Do you want the corrupt globalists at the World Health Organization in charge of it or do you want the United States of America to be at the wheel of our pandemic policy?”

The answer was simple, Tiffany said.

“The World Health Organization has proven time and time again that they cannot be trusted to carry out an effective pandemic response,” he said. “In 2019 they ignored Taiwan’s early warning about the Covid-19 outbreak. Then they parroted the lies of the Chinese Communist Party that there was no human-to-human transmission.”

Now the Biden-Harris administration is seeking to reward them, Tiffany said.

“The pandemic treaty draft includes no accountability or improved transparency measures for the CCP and its role in covering up the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic,” he said. “It focuses on mandated resource and technology transfers and shreds intellectual property rights. It also contains certain provisions that may police our First Amendment rights.”

Who Funds the WHO

As the presidential election approaches, Tiffany’s bill is taking on a new urgency precisely because it focuses attention on U.S. government funding of international operations, which is massive in scope. In fiscal year 2022 alone, the U.S. government provided more than $21 billion to 179 international organizations and multilateral entities. That number was somewhat spiked by the pandemic, but in 2019 it was still more than $12 billion.

Just a cursory look at WHO funding shows that even more stringent oversight of all WHO-related financing and statutory language is a must. The truth is, the proposed pandemic treaty merely codifies what is already happening, albeit likely at a slower pace than if the treaty was in place. Enacting Tiffany’s bill is thus a first step in scrutinizing and then unraveling much of what already exists.

For one thing, while the “treaty” would open the floodgates ever wider for the redistribution of wealth and knowledge, that redistribution is already underway through the WHO’s normal budgetary channels. Last year, member states, including the U.S., approved a WHO budget of $6.83 billion, of which $1.2 billion was earmarked for “emergency operations,” along with a 20-percent increase in the mandatory assessments for each nation. All totaled, member states are to contribute $1.15 billion through membership fees, while another $5.69 billion will come from “voluntary contributions” from “member states and other contributors.”

In 2023, U.S contributions to WHO totaled $481 million, and that preliminary number is likely underestimated. The U.S was the top contributor to the WHO for the 2022-23 biennium.

U.S. money is making its way into WHO coffers surreptitiously, too. For instance, in part because of urging by the Biden administration, the World Bank created a Pandemic Fund, the ostensible purpose of which is to “bring additional, dedicated resources for pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response to incentivize countries to increase investments, enhance coordination among partners, and serve as a platform for advocacy.”

There’s that “preparedness” word again, and the money is earmarked for “low and middle income nations.” In other words, this is more wealth redistribution in the name of preparing for nonexistent health emergencies.

In July, treasury secretary Janet Yellen announced that the United States was committing up to $667 million to support the Pandemic Fund through 2026, and, while the World Bank is the “host” sponsor, the WHO serves as the technical lead, which means it runs the show.

So the U.S. is sending the WHO hundreds of millions of dollars a year in direct and indirect, mandated and voluntary contributions instead of taking care of America first.

And just what are the contributions being used for exactly?

In his report to the 76th World Health Assembly this past May, director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it was for “preparedness” against some unnamed diseases that might or might not exist, in other words, emergencies that exist only in the imaginations of power-hungry bureaucrats.

“The threat of another variant emerging that causes new surges of disease and death remains,” Tedros said. “And the threat of another pathogen emerging with even deadlier potential remains … When the next pandemic comes knocking—and it will—we must be ready to answer decisively, collectively and equitably.”

Spoiler: The key words above are not ‘disease’ and ‘death.’ They are ‘collectively’ and ‘equitably.’

It’s not just money. Federal law is shot through and through with provisions ceding sovereign authority to the organization. Take the Global Health Security and International Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response Act of 2022, which was actually enacted as part of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act. It explicitly accomplishes much of what the WHO seeks in the way of authority.

Among other things, it states that “the president shall develop, update, maintain, and advance a comprehensive strategy for improving United States global health security and diplomacy for pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response which, consistent with the purposes of this subtitle, shall strengthen linkages between complementary bilateral and multilateral foreign assistance programs, including efforts of the World Bank, the World Health Organization, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, that contribute to the development of more resilient health systems and global supply chains for global health security and pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response in partner countries with the capacity, resources, and personnel required to prevent, detect, and respond to infectious disease threats.”

In other words, the law directs the government to pander to the Chinese-pandering WHO and to follow its strategic lead. It’s one thing to direct the government to “develop, update, maintain, and advance a comprehensive strategy for improving United States global health security and diplomacy.” It’s quite another to require that it be tethered to an international bureaucratic organization that worked against our national interests during the pandemic and whose manifest failures were obvious.

Of course our statutes are riddled with this kind of subversion because the Democratic Party and the Biden administration are not only on board with it but are aggressively pushing it.

In 2023, during that year’s discussion of the provisions in the proposed treaty agreement, Biden’s representative to the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) drafting the pandemic accord, Pamela Hamamoto, told those assembled, “the United States is committed to the Pandemic Accord, to form a major component of the global health architecture for generations to come.”

All of which makes the real point: Tiffany’s bill isn’t just necessary to stop a potential surrender of American sovereignty to international bureaucracy, it’s necessary to expose and reverse the surrender of sovereignty—the placement of that global health architecture—that is already taking place.

How the WHO Would Control and Influence the US Bureaucracy

It gets even worse. One of the great dangers of bureaucratic collectivism—the concentration of political power in unelected bureaucracies—is their genetic tendency to vertically integrate. That is to say, their operations metastasize and grow uncontrollably like a cancer, from the international to the national to the state to the local level, forming a parallel government in which lower level bureaucrats are more eager to please upper level bureaucrats than they are to comply with local, state, or federal law.

Before too long, the malignant bureaucracies overwhelm the normal body politic of elected officials.

Especially since the pandemic, public health agencies have been spreading and amalgamating, with the WHO at the top of the power pyramid. Its invading cells, both in policy and practice, transform national institutions serving America first into citizen members of an international bureaucratic conglomerate serving globalism first.

Is any of this really happening? You bet it is. To cite the fiscal 2023 NDAA again, that act directs federal agencies, with Health & Human Services in the lead, to pursue “the objectives of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Programme” and to support the “establishment, strengthening, and rapid response capacity of global health emergency operations centers.”

In the WHO’s own words, its collaborating centers are “institutions such as research institutes, parts of universities or academies, which are designated by the Director-General to carry out activities in support of the Organization’s programmes” … “at the country, intercountry, regional, interregional and global levels.”

In other words, the WHO is nation-building, remaking national identities with structures built in its own bureaucratic likeness, and it is unafraid to say its nation-building is driven by ideological agendas: “The WHO global strategy for people-centred and integrated health services builds on the universal health coverage and primary health care movements, as well as action on noncommunicable diseases and addressing the social determinants of health ….”

Of course this will require changes in the inconvenient way countries now govern themselves in public health policy:

“Strategic direction 5 is the creation of an enabling environment that brings together the different stakeholders to undertake the transformational change needed,” the interim report of the “WHO global strategy on people-centred and integrated health services” states. “This involves making changes in legislative frameworks, financial arrangements and incentives, and the reorientation of the workforce and public policy-making.”

And remember, such policies, remade to conform to WHO’s public health agenda, include not merely viruses but such public health threats as climate change and gun violence. Tedros clearly has this in mind when WHO talks about reorientation of policy making and his assertions last May that “pandemics are far from the only threat we face.”

“Climate change poses a multitude of complex health challenges, from extreme weather events to the spread of infectious diseases and the exacerbation of chronic conditions,” he wrote in 2023. “It cannot be prevented with a vaccine, or treated with an antibiotic. But we know that we can mitigate its impacts. Reducing emissions across all sectors is critical to contain climate change and keep 1.5C within reach. To do this, the world must decarbonize its energy systems and reduce emissions by at least 43 percent over the next seven years.”

All of this is is being driven by the top contributors to the WHO, not just the U.S. but Germany, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the European Commission, the GAVI (Vaccine) Alliance, and the United Kingdom (U.K.).

The proof is in the pudding. Already WHO collaboration centers are taking root across the United States, including at St. Jude’s Hospital, the University of Chicago, the CDC, and the University of New York at Buffalo.

Sometimes, a symbolic act tells the whole story, in this case the reality of an ongoing transformation of U.S. institutions into globalist ones. This past January, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security was officially renamed as the Collaborating Centre for Global Health Security by the WHO and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).

So what’s in a name? Everything.

And that’s why Rep. Tiffany’s bill is urgent. It will in fact draw a line in the sand for Democrats to cross before entering into any new agreements with the WHO and prevent the most debilitating short-term effects any such treaty would pose.

But, just as important, it will also draw attention to the need to scrutinize ongoing collaboration and surrender, to prompt lawmakers to separate surrendering provisions from omnibus bills to debate on their own merits, and to expose the rapid vertical integration of our nation’s institutions with international bureaucracies pursuing their own power agendas.

It should raise again the question: Why do we have anything to do with this organization anyway? Donald Trump was right in trying to get the U.S out and hopefully he’ll get the chance to do so again.

In the meantime, Tiffany’s pandemic bill isn’t sufficient by itself to prevent this massive redistribution of wealth and power, not to mention to halt any further erosion of our national identity, but it is a much needed and necessary first step.

The people in the countryside know this and they are paying attention; our leaders and influencers need to as well.