House Republicans took to the podium on May 17 to condemn the Biden administration’s negotiation of global pandemic agreements that they say will grant additional power to the World Health Organization (WHO) and centralize authority in an organization they say failed the American public during the COVID pandemic.
Shortly thereafter, on May 19, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus issued a report to member nations stating that, while the “re-emergence of epidemic-prone diseases continues to accelerate,” the WHO’s mandate regarding “health emergencies” must extend beyond pandemics to include hunger, poverty, ecological degradation, climate change, and social and economic inequalities.
The Director General wrote that member nations must establish a “global architecture for health emergency preparedness, prevention, response, and resilience (HEPR),” which includes “global governance, financing and HEPR systems.”
But GOP lawmakers disagreed with the WHO.
“International law does not trump our Constitution,” Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) stated. “Biden cannot force Americans to follow laws and regulations not passed by our own federal government.”
“The World Health Organization pandemic treaty is very vague, it affects our sovereignty, and it could be exploited to tell Americans what kind of health care they need in the event of a global pandemic,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said. The public forum was organized by Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) and included 18 House members.
Ambassador Pamela Hamamoto, on behalf of the United States, is currently negotiating terms of the WHO Pandemic Accord, which is scheduled to be signed by the 194 WHO member nations in 2024, as well as amendments to International Health Regulations (IHRs), also under the auspices of the WHO. In sum, these negotiations are intended to produce legally binding treaties and agreements that will coordinate a united response among member nations during a “health emergency,” with much of the decision-making authority vested in the WHO.
According to these agreements, the WHO would have the authority to, for example, declare when a pandemic is in effect and to coordinate medical supply chains to ensure equitable distribution among member nations. The agreements also speak to global coordination between the WHO and national health authorities like the CDC to set health policies, and coordination among governments on issues like fighting “misinformation.”
Failing Upwards
The preamble to the “zero draft” of the WHO Pandemic Accord states that this treaty is necessary because of the “catastrophic failure of the international community in showing solidarity and equity in response to the coronavirus disease.” But critics say that the WHO’s failures during the past several years are a reason to reduce its authority, rather than give it more.
“The World Health Organization is one of the most corrupt, incompetent and, after COVID-19, the most thoroughly discredited institutions on the global stage,” Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) stated. “And yet, one of Joe Biden’s first things that he did was to bring the United States back into this corrupt organization.”
On July 6, 2020, former President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the WHO and moved to cut off U.S. funding. Biden reversed this order immediately upon taking office.
Calling for the United States to withdraw from the WHO once again, House Republicans this week charged that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has undue influence in the WHO’s affairs.
“The House Foreign Affairs Committee issued a report on the CCP and its relationship with the World Health Organization with regard to COVID,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) said. “They said it’s beyond doubt that the CCP actively engaged in a coverup designed to obfuscate dates, hide relevant public health information, and suppress doctors and journalists who attempted to warn the world.”
The WHO, Biggs said, “responded to the CCP’s coverup by praising the CCP for their transparency … and repeatedly parroted CCP talking points.”
Republicans have introduced legislation this year in Congress, including the WHO Withdrawal Act that would end U.S. membership in the WHO, and the No Taxpayer Funding for the World Health Organization Act that would end America’s financial contributions to the WHO.
‘Greatest Intrusions on Civil Liberties in Peacetime History’
Negotiations with the WHO, which are taking place under a veil of secrecy, come in the wake of the COVID pandemic, which left many Americans concerned about government abuses of authority under the mantra of public health and safety.
Enumerating government abuses throughout the COVID pandemic, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote on May 18 in his opinion regarding Title 42 emergency decrees that “since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.”
Gorsuch stated: “Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes. They shuttered businesses and schools, public and private. They closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on. They threatened violators not just with civil penalties but with criminal sanctions too. They surveilled church parking lots, recorded license plates, and issued notices warning that attendance at even outdoor services satisfying all state social-distancing and hygiene requirements could amount to criminal conduct. They divided cities and neighborhoods into color-coded zones, forced individuals to fight for their freedoms in court on emergency timetables, and then changed their color-coded schemes when defeat in court seemed imminent.
“Federal executive officials entered the act too … They deployed a public-health agency to regulate landlord-tenant relations nationwide. They used a workplace-safety agency to issue a vaccination mandate for most working Americans. They threatened to fire noncompliant employees, and warned that service members who refused to vaccinate might face dishonorable discharge and confinement. Along the way, it seems federal officials may have pressured social-media companies to suppress information about pandemic policies with which they disagreed.”
Operating in Secrecy
While the WHO’s Pandemic Accord and IHR amendments promote causes like equity and inclusion, they do not prioritize personal civil liberties, such as freedom of speech, assembly, privacy, religious faith, and having a vote in policy decisions, which are all central to America’s founding documents. For example, the current public draft of the IHR amendments, which states how the regulations will be implemented, has deleted the phrase “with full respect for the dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of persons” and replaced it with “based on the principles of equity, inclusivity, coherence and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities of the States Parties, taking into consideration their social and economic development.”
An attorney who is involved in drafting the WHO documents told The Epoch Times he believes this amendment was rejected during negotiations, but that claim cannot be confirmed because subsequent revisions to the IHRs are no longer available to the public. In April, delegates from the United States agreed with a Chinese proposal that new IHR drafts would not be shared with the public.
Hamamoto stated at the time that “at this stage, I have some concern about sharing the draft to all stakeholders given where we are in the process.” In response, several nonprofit organizations and health experts wrote a letter to Health & Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and Secretary of State Antony Blinken protesting the secrecy of the negotiations.
“The attempt to create a veil of secrecy now surrounding the substantive and technical text-based negotiations on the WHO pandemic treaty sets a dangerous precedent for norm-setting at the multilateral level,” the letter states. “It also undermines trust in the process at a time when attacks on the WHO and on the pandemic accord are increasing.”
While the U.S. Constitution requires Senate approval for international treaties, the “zero draft” of the WHO Pandemic Accord includes a clause that the accord will go into effect on a “provisional” basis as soon as it’s signed by delegates to the WHO and would, therefore, be legally binding on members without being ratified by legislatures. The amendments to the IHRs do not require Senate approval and would also be legally binding on the United States.
Other U.S. Representatives who spoke out this week against efforts to empower the WHO included Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), Chris Smith (R-N.J.), Brian Babin (R-Texas), Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), Thomas Tiffany (R-Wis.), Chip Roy (R-Texas), Eli Crane (R-Ariz.), Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), Mary Miller (R-Ill.), Dan Bishop (R-N.C.), Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.), and Clay Higgins (R-La.).
Speaking alongside the House lawmakers, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) also criticized the WHO for what she said was its “agenda to sexualize children.”
“The WHO published international sexual education standards for children that included recommendations to teach infants-to-4-year-olds about the right to explore nakedness and teach 4-to-6-year-olds about early childhood masturbation,” Luna said. “What parent, what taxpayer thinks that this is normal? Frankly, if you’re supporting this, I think you’re a pervert and you need to stay completely away from children.”
Last week, two British newspapers reported on the WHO’s European guidelines on child sexuality, which stated that “sexuality education starts from birth.” The WHO guidance, the reports state, encourages “early childhood masturbation” at ages 0-4 years old.
A WHO representative reportedly defended the guidelines, saying they “reflect established psychological facts.” The UK government, however, rejected the WHO’s narrative.
“The UK Government does not recognize this WHO guidance and we don’t agree with its recommendations. We have not distributed or promoted it to schools,” a government spokesperson stated.
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.