by Kit Knightly at Off Guardian
The first public hearings on the proposed “Pandemic Treaty” are closed, with the next round due to start in mid-June.
We’ve been trying to keep this issue on our front page, entirely because the mainstream is so keen to ignore it and keep churning out partisan war porn and propaganda.
When we – and others – linked to the public submissions page, there was such a response that the WHO’s website actually briefly crashed, or they pretended it crashed so people would stop sending them letters.
Either way, it’s a win. Hopefully one we can replicate in the summer.
Until then, the signs are that what scant press coverage there is, mostly across the metaphorical back-pages of the internet, will be focused on making the treaty “strong enough” and ensuring national governments can be “held accountable”.
An article in the UK’s Telegraph from April 12th headlines:
Real risk a pandemic treaty could be ‘too watered down’ to stop new outbreaks
It focuses on a report from the Panel for a Global Public Health Convention (GPHC), and quotes one of the report’s authors Dame Barbara Stocking:
Our biggest fear […] is it’s too easy to think that accountability doesn’t matter. To have a treaty that does not have compliance in it, well frankly then there’s no point in having a treaty,”
The GPHC report goes on to say that the current International Health Regulations are “too weak”, and calls for the creation of a new “independent” international body to “assess government preparedness” and “publicly rebuke or praise countries, depending on their compliance with a set of agreed requirements”.
Another article, published by the London School of Economics and co-written by members of the German Alliance on Climate Change and Health (KLUG), also pushes the idea of “accountability” and “compliance” pretty hard:…
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