FRC Submits Comment Regarding WHO's Troubling Pandemic Preparedness Agreement

WASHINGTON, Jan. 23, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Family Research Council (FRC) submitted a comment to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) concerning the World Health Organization's (WHO) Pandemic Preparedness Agreement. The agreement has the potential to seriously undermine American national sovereignty, free speech, and human dignity among other troubling implications.

The comment stated in part: "We call on HHS to reject the Draft Agreement in its entirety and reconsider the need for a pandemic agreement. The Draft Agreement cannot be salvaged with amendments or edits. Furthermore, any agreement that the Biden administration signs must be submitted to the U.S. Senate for its consideration, advice, and consent. The staggering obligations, new policies, and array of new institutions created by the Draft Agreement require the submission of the agreement to the Senate for consideration as a treaty."

"We believe this vision for human flourishing is facilitated best by more localized political structures of representative, constitutional nation-states, and their subsidiary government layers (e.g., provinces, counties, and municipalities). FRC rejects any analytical framework wherein the best responses to any future pandemic could be promulgated by an amalgamation of world government structures. Although FRC recognizes that international cooperation between nations, international organizations, and NGOs has its benefits, the Draft Agreement only pays lip service to state sovereignty as it seeks to create new political arrangements that transfer power from individual member states to global institutions and sub-structures, most notably the WHO.

"The abject failures of public health organizations like the WHO, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) during the recent COVID-19 pandemic indicate that government-promulgated health narratives should be challengeable and open to public debate. The loss of that freedom will be far more life-threatening than any pandemic could be."

FRC Action, the legislative affiliate of FRC, separately called on its members to contact the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on this issue as well.

Dr. Chris Gacek, Senior Fellow for Regulatory Affairs at Family Research Council, who authored the comment, added: "On issue after issue, whether the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccines, the need for scientific censorship, and most especially, national sovereignty, the WHO has been wrong at every turn. We must speak out against this international agency's ceaseless efforts to seize power, including through its proposed Pandemic Preparedness Agreement. We must not let power be aggrandized by unelected international bureaucrats that threaten every nation-state's right to act in the best interest of its people."

To read FRC's full comment, visit: https://downloads.frc.org/EF/EF24A66.pdf  

SOURCE Family Research Council