The fundamental crisis with the WHO’s new international pandemic agreement

The WHO’s Managerial Gambit

The WHO is now proposing a new international pandemic agreement and amendments to the International Health Regulations. These proposals will make next time worse. Not because they override sovereignty, but because they will protect domestic authorities from responsibility. States will still have their powers. The WHO plan will shield them from the scrutiny of their own people.

On Friday, Bret Weinstein warned of impending tyranny from the World Health Organization. “We are in the middle of a coup,” the evolutionary biologist and podcaster told Tucker Carlson on X. The WHO’s new pandemic management regime will eliminate sovereignty, Weinstein said, and allow it to override national constitutions.

He’s right about tyranny and coups. But not about sovereignty or constitutions.

Technocrats learned a lot from Covid. Not how to avoid policy mistakes, but how to exercise control. Public authorities discovered that they could tell people what to do. They locked people down, closed their businesses, made them wear masks, and herded them to vaccination clinics. In some countries, people endured the most extreme restrictions on civil liberties in peacetime history.

The WHO is now proposing a new international pandemic agreement and amendments to the International Health Regulations. These proposals will make next time worse. Not because they override sovereignty, but because they will protect domestic authorities from responsibility. States will still have their powers. The WHO plan will shield them from the scrutiny of their own people.

Under the proposals, the WHO will become the directing mind and will of global health. It will have authority to declare public health emergencies. National governments will promise to do as the WHO directs. Countries will “undertake to follow WHO’s recommendations.” WHO measures “shall be initiated and completed without delay by all State Parties…[who] shall also take measures to ensure Non-State Actors [private citizens and domestic businesses] operating in their respective territories comply with such measures.” Lockdowns, quarantine, vaccines, surveillance, travel restrictions, and more will be on the table.

That sounds like a loss of sovereignty, but it is not. Sovereign states have exclusive jurisdiction in their own territory. WHO recommendations cannot be directly enforced in American courts. Sovereign nations can agree to follow the authority of international organizations. They can undertake to tie their own hands and to fashion their domestic laws accordingly.

The WHO proposals are a shell game. The scheme will provide cover to domestic public health authorities. Power will be ubiquitous but no one will be accountable. Citizens will lack control over the governance of their countries, as they already do. The danger that confronts us is still our own sprawling discretionary administrative state, soon to be boosted and camouflaged by an unaccountable international bureaucracy.

When countries make treaties, they make promises to each other. International law may regard those promises as “binding.” But they are not binding in the same sense as a domestic contract. International law is a different animal from domestic law. In Anglo-American countries, the two legal systems are distinct.

International courts cannot enforce treaty promises against unwilling parties in the same way that a domestic court can enforce contractual promises. International law is formalized international politics. Countries make promises to each other when it is in their political interests to do so. They keep those promises on the same criteria. When they don’t, political consequences sometimes follow. Formal legal consequences rarely do.

Nevertheless, the idea is to persuade the public that their governments must obey the WHO. Binding recommendations legitimize the heavy hands of domestic governments. Local officials will be able to justify restrictions by citing global duties. They will say that WHO directives leave them no choice. “The WHO has called for lockdowns, so we must order you to stay in your home. Sorry, but it’s not our call.”

During Covid, authorities tried to censor dissenting views. Despite their best efforts, skeptics managed to speak out. They offered alternative explanations in podcasts, videos, declarations, research papers, columns, and tweets. For many people, they were the source of sanity and truth. But next time things may be different. Under the new pandemic regime, countries will commit to censoring “false, misleading, misinformation or disinformation.”

As Weinstein put it, “Something is quietly moving just out of sight, in order that we will not have access to these tools the next time we face a serious emergency. … What [the WHO] wants are the measures that would have allowed them to silence the podcasters, to mandate various things internationally in a way that would prevent the emergence of a control group that would allow us to see harms clearly.”

The WHO documents will not override constitutions in Anglo-American countries. In the United States, the First Amendment will still apply. But the meaning of constitutions is not static. International norms can influence how courts read and apply constitutional provisions. Courts can take account of developing international standards and customary international law. The WHO proposals would not replace or define the meaning of constitutional rights. But they would not be irrelevant either.

The WHO is not undermining democracy. Countries have done that over time by themselves. National governments must approve the new plan, and any can opt out as they wish. Without their agreement, the WHO has no power to impose its dictates. Not all countries may be keen on all the details. The WHO proposals call for massive financial and technical transfers to developing countries. But climate change pacts do too. In the end rich countries embraced them anyway. They were keen to virtue-signal and justify their own climate boondoggles. Most can be expected to sign on to the WHO gambit too.

Countries who do so retain the sovereignty to change their minds. But leaving international regimes can be hellishly difficult. When the UK belonged to the European Union, it agreed to be subject to EU rules on all manner of things. It remained a sovereign country and could decide to get out from under the EU’s thumb. But Brexit threatened to tear the country apart. Having the legal authority to withdraw does not mean that a country is politically able to do so. Or that its elites are willing, even if that’s what its people want.

Numerous critics have made the same allegations as Weinstein, that the WHO’s regime will eliminate sovereignty and override constitutions. Brownstone writers have done so, for example, here and here. These allegations are easy to dismiss. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the WHO, has repeatedly said that no country will cede sovereignty to the WHO. Reuters, the Associated Press, and other mainstream news outlets have done “fact checks” to debunk the claim. Saying that the WHO will steal sovereignty allows critics to be discredited as conspiracy theorists. It distracts from the game that is afoot.

The WHO proposals will protect power from accountability. National governments will be in on the plan. The people are the problem they seek to manage. The new regime will not override sovereignty but that is small comfort. Sovereignty provides no protection from your own authoritarian state.

Author

Bruce Pardy

Bruce Pardy is executive director of Rights Probe and professor of law at Queen’s University.

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Winnipeg Universities Flunk The Free Speech Test

Published on October 12, 2025

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Tom Flanagan

Frances Widdowson faced mob hostility for saying unmarked graves have yet to be proven

Dr. Frances Widdowson’s visit to Winnipeg on Sept. 25 and 26 should have been an opportunity for debate. Instead, the city’s universities endorsed a statement that undermines academic freedom.

Widdowson, a political scientist known for questioning official narratives about residential schools, came to meet students who wanted to ask about claims of “unmarked graves.” Those claims, which became national headlines in 2021 after ground-penetrating radar surveys at former school sites, remain unproven because no physical evidence of burials has been found.

For many Canadians, the claims of “unmarked graves” were a shocking revelation, given how widely the story was reported as a settled fact.

That context alone should have been enough to spark discussion. Instead, the University of Manitoba and the University of Winnipeg joined the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs in issuing a statement that should embarrass both schools. At institutions dedicated to study and inquiry, the instinct should be to ask more questions, not to shut them down.

At first, the statement sounded reasonable. It said the universities did not “condone violence or threats to anyone’s safety.” But that did not stop Widdowson from being roughed up by a mob at the University of Winnipeg. It would be refreshing if the universities condemned mob violence with the same urgency they condemned a professor answering questions. Their silence sends its own message about which kind of behaviour is tolerated on campus.

The bigger problem is the statement’s claim that there is a single “truth” about residential schools, known to “survivors,” and that questioning it amounts to “denial.” In reality, 143 residential schools operated with federal support for more than a century. What happened varied widely from place to place and decade to decade.

That is a subject for historical research, grounded in evidence and debate, not pronouncements about capital-T “Truth” issued by communications offices. Canadians deserve to know that history is still being studied, not declared untouchable.

Worse still was the statement’s promise to “press the Government of Canada to enact legislation that makes residential school denialism a crime.” The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs is free to say what it wants. But universities lending their names to a demand that historical inquiry be criminalized is beyond misguided; it is dangerous.

Criminalizing “denialism” would mean that even challenging details of the residential school record could be punishable by law. Canadians should think carefully before accepting laws that turn historical debate into a criminal offence.

The University of Chicago’s widely praised statement on academic freedom puts it well: “the University’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed. It is for the individual members of the University community, not for the University as an institution, to make those judgments for themselves.” That principle should also guide Canadian universities. Academic freedom is not a luxury; it is the foundation of higher education.

Worst of all, these positions were not even issued in the names of presidents or academic leaders. They were issued under “media relations.” Imagine being a serious scholar or scientist at one of these universities and discovering that the media office had taken a political stance on your behalf.

I know how I would feel: undermined as a professional and silenced as a citizen.

Tom Flanagan is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and co-editor of the best-selling book Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools).

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Efforts to halt Harry Potter event expose the absurdity of trans activism

Published on October 10, 2025

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By J. Edward Les, MD

The Vancouver Park Board hasn’t caved to the anti-J.K. Rowling activists, but their campaign shows a need for common sense

This November, Harry Potter is coming to Vancouver’s Stanley Park. And some people aren’t happy.

The park will host Harry Potter: A Forbidden Forest Experience, an immersive exhibit that’s been staged around the world, prompting outrage from the gay and trans community. Why? Because J.K. Rowling, the creative genius behind the Harry Potter franchise, has been deemed a heretic — a “transphobe” — for her publicly stated view that men are men and women are women.

Rowling’s journey into so-called heresy began almost six years ago when she dared to publicly support Maya Forstater, a British tax expert who lost her job for asserting on social media that transgender women remain men.

“Dress however you please,” Rowling posted on Twitter in 2019. “Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill.”

It seemed to me and many others a rather benign tweet. But it was enough to generate global outrage from the trans community and its supporters. Rowling’s books have been boycotted and burned, with even the actors who portrayed Harry Potter characters on screen — most notably Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint — turning against the author who made them famous.

And yet Rowling has stuck to her guns, defending women and their right to enjoy spaces free of biological males in shelters, prisons, sports and so on. And she has stood against the “gender-affirming care” model that transitions children; in an X post last December, she said, “There are no trans kids. No child is ‘born in the wrong body.’”

It is — or should be — fair game to debate Rowling’s views. But in the hyper-polarized world of transgenderism, debate isn’t permitted. Only cancellation will suffice. Hence the angry response to the Vancouver Park Board’s greenlighting of the “Forest Experience” exhibit.

Vancouver city councillors Lucy Maloney and Sean Orr have called for the park board to reverse its decision.

“The trans and two-spirit community have made their voices heard already about how upset they are that this is happening,” Maloney said. “J.K. Rowling’s actions against the trans community are so egregious that I think we need to look at changing our minds on this.”

Orr concurred. “This is a reputational risk for the park board right now,” he said. “If there’s a way we can get out of this, we should consider this.

Thus far, thankfully, most park board commissioners have stood their ground. The exhibit is scheduled to go ahead as planned.

It’s worth emphasizing that since Rowling began her public defence of biological reality, much has changed. In 2024, the final report of the United Kingdom’s Cass Review exposed the shocking lack of evidence for the “gender-affirming” model of care; this led to a ban on puberty blockers in that country. Multiple European jurisdictions have done the same, enacting safeguards around transitioning youth. Major sports organizations have begun formally excluding biological males from female competitions. And in April 2025, the British Supreme Court decreed that “woman” and “sex” refer to biological sex assigned at birth, not gender identity.

Suffice it to say that Rowling has been vindicated.

Yet, as shown by a report published last year by the Aristotle Foundation (which I co-authored), Canada is increasingly an outlier in doubling down on transgender ideology. The Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian Pediatric Society and the Canadian Psychological Association continue to endorse the “gender-affirming” model of care. Even Canada’s Gordon Guyatt, hailed as one of the “fathers” of evidence-based medicine, has been cowed into distancing himself from his own research, which laid bare the scant amount of evidence supporting “gender-affirming” care.

It’s hard to know what it will take to set Canada back on a path of common sense and scientific rationality. Some Potter-style magic, perhaps. Or failing that, a return to good old-fashioned tolerance for open discussion and an honest exchange of views.

Dr. J. Edward Les is a pediatrician in Calgary and a senior fellow at the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy. Photo: WikiCommons