By Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone dot org.

The decades-old International Health Regulations, as amended last year, came into effect on 19 September. A new Pandemic Agreement, adopted in May, will be opened for signature after a pathogens access and benefits sharing deal that is expected to be reached next year.

The WHO Pandemic Accords, as the two documents are known, are a good example of the type of global governance initiatives on which there is a consensus among technocratic elites, but against which there is a rising populist revolt. Two other examples that were mentioned by President Donald Trump in his UN address on 23 September are immigration and climate change. The speech was a wide-ranging defence of national sovereignty against globalism.

Flawed Assumptions

Yet, pandemics are rare events that, compared to endemic infectious and chronic diseases, impose a low disease burden. The rationale for the accords rests on the false understanding that the risk of pandemics is rapidly growing, predominantly from increasing zoonotic spillover events in which pathogens move from animals to humans. Well-founded suspicion that Covid arose from gain-of-function research and a lab leak negates the second part of this justification.

The assumption of increasing pandemic risk is also undermined by work from the University of Leeds. They show that the reports of the WHO, World Bank, and G20 that back the pandemic agenda don't support the agencies' claims. Data show reducing mortality and outbreaks in the decade prior to 2020. Much of the recorded 'increase' in episodes reflects improved diagnostic technologies, not more frequent and more serious outbreaks.

Previous major epidemic diseases like yellow fever, influenza, and cholera continue to decline overall. The historical timeline of pandemics shows that improvements in sanitation, hygiene, potable water, antibiotics, and other forms of expanding access to good healthcare have massively reduced the morbidity and mortality of pandemics since the Spanish flu (1918-20) in which fifty million people are believed to have died.

According to Our World in Data, in the 105 years since the Spanish flu, a grand total of 10-14 million people have died in pandemics including Covid-19. To put this in perspective, in 2019 alone, nearly eight million people died from non-Covid infectious diseases. Another 41 million deaths were caused by non-communicable diseases. In the five years 2020-2024 inclusive, 7.1 million Covid-related deaths were recorded.

Projecting the trendlines from 2000-2019, in the 2020-24 five years, we could have expected a total of around 35 million deaths from non-Covid infectious diseases and another 220 million from non-communicable; that is, chronic diseases.

Calculations by Leeds university's REPPARE project also show how key claims of massive costs from pandemics are inflated whilst the costs of endemic infections are downplayed. Establishing a dedicated, treaty-based, and resource-intensive international machinery to prepare for a low-burden disease of infrequent outbreaks will distort public health priorities and divert scarce resources and finite attention from more urgent health and other goals.

This is bad public policy that fails the basic test of cost-benefit analysis.

Expanded Powers and Increased Resources for the WHO

Covid saw a successful bureaucratic coup that displaced elected governments with unelected experts and technocrats as de facto policy-makers. The pandemic accords provide the WHO legal authority to declare an actual or apprehended emergency and the power thereafter to commandeer resources for itself from sovereign states and redirect resources funded by the taxpayers of one country to other states, on the basis of what the WHO chief alone considers simply a risk of potential harm.

Many governments argue that other issues like climate change, gun violence, and racism also constitute public health emergencies. These would expand the WHO's remit even more....