Victory at the World Health Assembly!

Written by –
LESLYN LEWIS
JUNE 1, 2022

I’m so proud of Canadians.

Engaged Citizens all over the world worked tirelessly to ensure that the changes to the International Health Regulations did not pass at the World Health Assembly last week. As you recall, those changes would have given the World Health Organization (the WHO, which is a United Nations organization) more power over pandemic designation and response within our country.  We said NO to a group of global unelected bureaucrats meddling in our pandemic health care response.

Here’s the timeline of how we won against WHO overreach:

1. January 18, 2022, the US Biden administration proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR). There was a shroud of secrecy around these amendments and a lot of talk was generated about the Global Pandemic Treaty (which has not yet been drafted) in the following months.
2. May 17, 2022, I launched a petition to Stop the Treaty.
3. May 18, 2022, I questioned Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on why Canada would consider signing these amendments and asked for a national inquiry into our own pandemic response. Later that day, I hosted a Facebook Live event to explain the concerning parts of the IHR amendments.
4. May 19, 2022, the CBC – which receives $1.2 billion annually from the government – ran an article criticizing my claims and had supposedly neutral experts suggest that I was misleading people, fear-mongering, and spouting conspiracy theories.
5. May 22, 2022, I discovered that the so-called experts were not neutral at all, but boast ties to the Trudeau Foundation and even the WHO.
6. May 23, 2022, I sent a letter to Minister Jean-Yves Duclos (the Minister of Health and Head of the Canadian delegation to the WHA meeting in Geneva) urging him not to sign the IHR amendments, and shared with him the overwhelming response to my petition, with over 22,000 Canadian signatures.
7. I discovered that civil society groups around the world were fighting this too. On Friday, May 20, 2022 a United Kingdom resident took his government to court to find out what they were doing with the IHR amendments and to get documents disclosed to the public. Documents revealed a lack of consensus between countries in the Working Group on Pandemic Response.
   (Unconfirmed sources say many African and South American nations had serious concerns with the amendments). While we cannot attribute any one incident to the lack of consensus, we know that there was mounting pressure from civil society around the globe, including the court case.
8. May 24, 2022, it appeared that Biden’s IHR amendments were no longer on the table and new amendments were submitted to the Working Group on Pandemic Response. However, these  were submitted in violation of Article 55 of the IHR which requires all amendments to be submitted at least 4 months prior to the World Health Assembly. This notice period is necessary so that civil society can have time to review and respond.
9. May 27, 2022 the replacement amendments were revised and published by the World Health Organization, and then adopted by the World Health Assembly (see video).
10. Victory secured! While the replacement amendments are likely illegitimate because they break the notice requirement rule, they appear to be much milder than the original amendments. It seems the WHA felt the need to replace the old amendments with something else since they could not reach consensus. Our work to help sound the alarm contributed to the lack of consensus, prompting the WHA to drop the original amendments. We won!

But we must not stop here. We must continue to watch the drafting process of the Global Pandemic Treaty to make sure there are no more attempted power grabs by the WHO. We must also be thankful that this was a window into what the WHO wants to do – reduce public consultation opportunity and harmonize and centralize pandemic response away from sovereign nations to the WHO elites. Now that we know, we must press for transparency in the WHO and WHA process going forward.

If I am elected leader of the Conservative Party I will never back down from a fight with the WHO, WHA, WEF or any organization that wants to infringe on our sovereignty.

Will you support me as I continue to fight back for Canada?