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Attorneys general from 22 states sent a letter Wednesday to Joe Biden opposing his plan to sign the United States onto the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Health Regulations (IHR) amendments and the new Pandemic Treaty, which would grant “unprecedented and unconstitutional powers” to the United Nations (UN) health agency.
The letter comes as member nations prepare to meet in Geneva this month to vote on whether to grant vast new powers to the WHO.
Led by Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, the coalition wrote to Biden that, despite changes made to the initial draft of the Pandemic Treaty, the latest version is “still highly problematic,” with proceedings they describe as “fluid and opaque” in nature.
Additionally, the AGs asserted that the “IHR amendment process has largely occurred behind closed doors as the working group considers hundreds of proposals,” a situation that led the state officials to conclude:
To varying degrees, these measures would threaten national sovereignty, undermine states’ authority, and imperil constitutionally guaranteed freedoms. Ultimately, the goal of these instruments isn’t to protect public health. It’s to cede authority to the WHO— specifically its Director-General—to restrict our citizens’ rights to freedom of speech, privacy, movement (especially travel across borders) and informed consent.
The chief state law enforcement officers warned that, if the documents are approved by member nations, the WHO would be transformed “from an advisory, charitable organization into the world’s governor of public health.”
They explain how the WHO’s new authority would affect Americans:
Under proposed IHR amendments and the Pandemic Treaty … the WHO’s Director-General would achieve the power to unilaterally declare a “public health emergency of international concern” (PHEIC) in one or more member nations. Such declarations can include perceived or potential emergencies other than pandemics, including climate change, immigration, gun violence, or even “emergencies” involving plants, animals, or ecosystems. The more egregious versions of the proposals would authorize the Director-General to dictate what must be done in response to a declared PHEIC. In other words, America’s elected representatives would no longer set the nation’s public health policies. Even watered down, these proposals would inappropriately cede American sovereignty to the WHO.
The AGs referred to COVID-19 policies to make their point. They cited the words of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, who, in his concurring opinion last year in Arizona v. Mayorkas, wrote that government COVID responses represented “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.”
“Meanwhile, the WHO failed to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable for its lies and deceptions during the pandemic,” the AGs continued. “Rather than learning from these failures, some inexplicably want to relinquish more power to unelected and unaccountable institutions.”
The letter’s signers impressed upon Biden as well that delegating public health decisions to an international body is unconstitutional.
“The U.S. Constitution doesn’t vest responsibility for public health policy with the federal government,” they noted. “It reserves those powers for the States.”
Further, the AGs pointed out that the proposed IHR amendments and Pandemic Treaty “would lay the groundwork for a global surveillance infrastructure, ostensibly in the interest of public health, but with the inherent opportunity for control (as with Communist China’s ‘social credit system’).”
Even the latest draft, the state AGs observed, tells member nations to “cooperate, in accordance with national law, in preventing misinformation and disinformation,” language that Americans consistently heard during the COVID pandemic from the Biden administration.
“This is particularly dangerous given that your administration pressured and encouraged social-media companies to suppress free speech during COVID-19,” the AGs told Biden:
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed fundamental flaws with the WHO and other public health institutions. These entities breached public trust and are unquestionably in need of reform. The proposed measures, however, would only exacerbate the WHO’s underlying problems and enable more civil liberties violations during future “emergencies.”
“Accordingly, we will resist any attempt to enable the WHO to directly or indirectly set public policy for our citizens,” the letter concluded.
In addition to Montana, the AGs of the following states signed onto the letter: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia.
