How bad are the Covid-inspired amendments to the International Health Regulations of the World Health Assembly?

Many have asked me for my thoughts on the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) of the World Health Assembly. As the proverb goes, you should be careful what you wish for: I see no earthly way of making this post entertaining, but in what follows I will do my best to assess the worst of these amendments, in the manner of Tacitus – sine ira et studio.

Some background: The WHA first adopted the International Health Regulations in 1969, and they were substantially revised in the wake of the SARS outbreak in 2005. They are binding on 196 member states, including all 194 members of the World Health Organisation. As of 2005, their stated purpose is “to prevent, protect against, control, and provide a public health response to the international spread of disease in ways that are commensurate with and restricted to public health risks and that avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade.” In the wake of the Covid pandemic, member states were invited to propose amendments to this treaty. These individual proposals are collected in a long 200-page document here. All the separate contributions also have been gathered into a much shorter 46-page “article-by-article compilation” here. The amendments have been a particular focus of analysis at the excellent Brownstone Institute. For more background, please see this Unofficial Q&A by David Bell and Thi Thuy Van Dinh, as well as this piece by David Thunder, on Why Governments Must Reject New Amendments to International Health Regulations. Finally, David Bell provides this annotated guide to the most worrying proposed changes. It is extremely comprehensive, and I’ve not been able to find anything of note that he didn’t already unearth.

The shorter 46-page document is what most people will study, not least because it is all in English. Unfortunately, it is powerfully misleading, because it has been stripped of all information about which countries proposed each of the amendments. This lends the impression that it is the World Health Organisation itself that is demanding these changes, but that is not the case. Every last amendment originates with a WHO member state. I have done the brain-breaking work of tracing all the most worrisome proposals back to their origins, and the exercise proved highly illuminating, because it allows me to say with confidence that the bad stuff in this document has four sources:

1) The developing world, particularly India, Bangladesh, African WHO member states, and to a lesser extent Malaysia all want more free stuff from the developed world.

2) The United States are interested in compulsory information sharing about developing pandemic threats. These provisions are clearly directed at China.

3) The European Union and, bizarrely enough, Indonesia, want vaccine passports.

4) The Russian Federation (and curiously, only the Russian Federation) wants more censorship to combat “disinformation.”

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