Reps. Chris Smith and Brad Wenstrup Lead Congressional Press Conference

Oppose Accords Now Under Stealthy Negotiation Aimed at Fundamentally Transforming the W.H.O.

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VIDEO and FULL TRANSCRIPT:  https://sovereignty.substack.com/p/transcript-joint-press-conference

WASHINGTON, D.C.—On February 5^th, two influential members of the House of Representatives hosted a Capitol Hill press conference featuring remarks by them and a number of experts and activists calling for the rejection of two agreements now being stealthily negotiated by the United States government, those of Communist China and other nations and World Health Organization (WHO) bureaucrats with the support of Bill Gates, the World Economic Forum and Big Pharma.

Representatives Chris Smith of New Jersey and Brad Wenstrup of Ohio, chairmen respectively of the House Foreign Affairs Committee's Subcommittee on Global Health, Global Human Rights & International Organizations and the House Oversight and Accountability Committee’s Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, were joined by representatives of leading public policy organizations including: the Heritage Foundation, the Family Research Council, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, Women’s Rights without Frontiers, the Center for Security Policy and the Sovereignty Coalition.  (A full transcript of the event and its participants is available here.)

Highlights of the press conference included the following:

Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ-4), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee's Subcommittee on Global Health, Global Human Rights & International Organizations (FULL 00:00:50-00:10:17):

“The proposed W.H.O. pandemic treaty or agreement, however, which U.N. News explicitly states will be a binding…on any country that agrees to it. They say, “Such agreements may between countries have legal standing and are binding,” is under consideration by the intergovernmental negotiating body or the INB in Geneva, who likely will present a final text on May 27th for the World Health Assembly vote outside the INB (International Negotiating Body). However, far too little scrutiny has been given, far too few questions have been asked as to what this legally binding agreement or treaty means to health policy and the United States and elsewhere.

If approved, it remains unclear whether the Biden administration intends to submit this treaty agreement to the Senate for its constitutionally required advice and consent is a prerequisite for ratification. An executive agreement, however, bypassing Senate ratification would be an egregious mistake.”

Rep. Dr. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH-2), Chairman, U.S. Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (FULL 00:10:17-00:16:10):

“The Covid 19 pandemic showed the world that the W.H.O., the World Health Organization, is not the preeminent global health institution that perhaps it once was. … We witnessed firsthand that the W.H.O. didn't equally serve all of its members, or even all of mankind. Rather, it became beholden to and caved to political pressure. And politics should never have a place in science, known science or unknown science. And honesty and transparency do have a place in science. It's where it belongs.

 When the W.H.O. needed to step up and help the world navigate this unprecedented event of a novel coronavirus and a global pandemic, they instead ignored facts. They parroted back some of the narrative the Chinese Communist Party told them. And that's what we got. So instead of conducting their own independent investigation into the origins of Covid and helping everyone keep safe as best we can, they listen to Chinese propaganda and produced a Pandemic Origins report with the CCP.”

Ambassador Andrew Bremberg, US ambassador to the UN in Geneva, President, Victims of Communism (FULL 00:16:41-00:21:23):

“The discussion of the W.H.O. Pandemic Treaty is vitally important to Americans and everyone around the world. …there are many problematic provisions of this treaty, but I would like to focus my opening my remarks on one. What is not in the treaty. There is no provision in this treaty that any supporter can point to that you can say if this provision had been in effect in 2019, it would have in any way made a substantive difference in preventing or ameliorating the spread of the Covid 19 pandemic.…

This treaty, if entered into it, would have the force of law, could have huge impacts on the United States and of course, would build a larger W.H.O. bureaucracy, which unfortunately, as we saw after 2020, failed the last time. So, with no new accountability for either member states or for W.H.O., it's vitally important that the United States not adopt this new pandemic treaty.”

Tony Perkins, President, Family Research Council (FULL 00:31:33 – 00:38:22):

“I served as chair of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom and saw how Western governments used that to violate fundamental human rights. Freedom of speech, the censoring of voices on social media platforms. Government officials intentionally took down credible scientific voices that challenged the global misdiagnosis and subsequent global protocols. Families were separated. Churches and other support groups were closed like schools, which led to a second concern that the harmful mental physical outcomes are yet to be fully understood and recognized, which resulted from this global government overreach.

Now, at the tip of the spear of these failed approaches was the World Health Organization and many of their lemmings in the US Food and Drug Administration, the US center for Disease Control and the US National Institutes of Health. Instead of reviewing and acknowledging its failures, the W.H.O. seeks to submit to submit its disastrous approach to the entire world as the way forward in a binding agreement which by its nature, not its name, but it is a treaty, and it should be submitted to the U.S. Senate and not advanced as it is currently being advanced.”

Brett Schaefer, Jay Kingham Senior Research Fellow in International Regulatory Affairs at Heritage's Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom (FULL 00:38:47- 00:43:18):

“We're all familiar with the failure of the international health system to respond to Covid 19. China failed to inform the international community of the outbreak in a timely manner. China mischaracterized Covid 19, saying that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission, which the W.H.O. parroted unquestioningly. China did not expeditiously share genomic data about the disease and did not allow prompt, unconditional access to an international team of health experts. China shut down internal travel while allowing international travel, contributing to the spread of the disease.

All of this resulted in millions of deaths and trillions in economic harm. At a minimum, you would expect a new pandemic treaty to address these fundamental flaws and failures that were revealed during Covid 19. The current draft does no such thing. Instead, the draft agreement focuses on curtailing speech, as some people have noted here mandating resource transfers, weakening intellectual property rights, mandating technology sharing, pushing redistribution of manufacturing and production, and empowering the W.H.O. specifically.…Quite simply, the draft pandemic agreement falls short in nearly every regard.”

Reggie Littlejohn, Co-Founder, Sovereignty Coalition and President of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers (00:44:59 – 00:51:19):

Together with the International Health Regulations, the pandemic treaty presents the greatest threat to freedom that the world has ever faced. Public health is being used as a tool for total control. This is not a public health issue, but an instrument to introduce Chinese style totalitarianism to the United States and worldwide. In my opinion, the world has gotten along just fine without a pandemic treaty. I don't think we really need a pandemic treaty. We can count on people to respond, especially the generosity of the United States to help where it's needed. But we certainly do not need a pandemic treaty that gives so much power and control to the World Health Organization. Who will keep the W.H.O. accountable? Who can stop them from abusing their power? Once we have ceded our sovereignty, it will be difficult, if not impossible, ever to get it back.”

Frank J. Gaffney, Founder and Executive Chairman, Center for Security Policy, Vice Chair of the Committee on the Present Danger: China, and Co-Founder of Sovereignty Coalition (00:55:30 – 01:06:04), quote:

“If you take nothing else away from what my colleagues have shared with you, it is there's a lot to be concerned about. And it's not just this treaty or framework agreement or whatever they're going to call it. It's also these underlying international health regulations.…The Chinese Communist Party calls this agenda ‘global governance.’ By that they mean an instrument that is going to create an arrangement that is absolutely antithetical to our sovereignty, to our constitutional republic, to our freedoms. Again, not by accident or because people hadn't thought about it, because that's the whole point of the exercise.…The people who are controlling this process—and there are a number. But let's be clear. At the top of the food chain is the Chinese Communist Party.

And the Chinese Communist Party wants no part of any kind of arrangements that even technically, legally, would impose upon them some obligations to be transparent, to be accountable, to prevent doing in the future what they did in the past, and to avoid imposing on the rest of us through their handmaidens at the World Health Organization the “China model” which has brought us such horrific consequences.

This is a rigged game, folks. Rigged by the very people who made a weapon of mass destruction and deliberately unleashed it on us and the rest of the world.…I hope everyone in this room, everyone in this body, everyone in this town, everyone in this country will concern themselves with the idea that down this road leads a global governance arrangement that is designed to crush—not restrict, not suppress—to crush the sovereignty of the United States.”

The urgency associated with this press conference – and its call to withhold funding for the WHO going forward – is especially acute insofar as decisions are expected in the near future that will determine the fate of the appropriations bills that are supposed to help fund the World Health Organization.

The current House-passed FY 2024 Foreign Operations bill eliminates all such funding and makes future U.S. donations contingent on the U.S. Senate giving its advice and consent to whatever accords emerge from the present negotiations. The Senate has not produced a counterpart bill. All other things being equal, however, it is expected to continue funding the WHO at last year’s levels as part of an “omnibus” measure or continuing resolution.

Given the dire stakes for our constitutional Republic of a WHO on steroids, it is imperative that federal legislators join forces to ensure that they neither appropriate for the use of the World Health Organization contributions that would crush U.S. sovereignty and Americans’ medical freedoms nor otherwise surrender to hostile international bureaucrats authority reserved under the U.S. Constitution for the states to determine public health policy.

WHAT: A joint press conference on “The growing concerns over the WHO 'pandemic treaty'”

WHEN: Monday, February 5, 2024

WHO:

Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ-4), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee's Subcommittee on Global Health, Global Human Rights & International Organizations

Rep. Dr. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH-2), Chairman, U.S. Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic

Ambassador Andrew Bremberg, US ambassador to the UN in Geneva, President, Victims of Communism

Dr. Monique Chireau Wubbenhorst, former Senior Deputy Assistant Administrator in the Bureau for Global Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)

Tony Perkins, President, Family Research Council

Brett Schaefer, Jay Kingham Senior Research Fellow in International Regulatory Affairs at Heritage's Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom

Reggie Littlejohn, Co-Founder, Sovereignty Coalition and President of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers

Megan Meador, Communications Director, Alliance Defending Freedom International

Frank J. Gaffney, Founder and Executive Chairman, Center for Security Policy, Vice Chair of the Committee on the Present Danger: China, and Co-Founder of Sovereignty Coalition

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CONTACTS:

To interview representatives of the Sovereignty Coalition, contact Matthew Franklin, mfranklin@securefreedom.org

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