A petition to stop the treaty is embedded at the bottom of this story.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the German Health Minister are saying that countries disobeying regulations dictated by the WHO through their pandemic treaty may need to be sanctioned.

According to German Health Minister Jens Spahn Spahn, sanctioning China might have been helpful to pressure the country into releasing details about the origins of COVID early on in the pandemic and may be a valuable tool in the future.

“I have asked myself several times, if it had started in Germany or a European country, or the U.S., how would we have cooperated with the WHO? Because of course, there are so many dimensions to it: politics, prestige, science,” Spahn said. He added that a debate regarding sanctions is “not an easy debate, but I think it is a necessary debate.”

Of course, WHO head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus agrees that it should be on the table, saying “exploring the sanctions may be important.”

As reported by The Epoch Times, scholars from the London School of Economics, Kings College London, and the German Alliance on Climate Change and Health are also proposing various sanctions to coerce sovereign nations into compliance with international health regulations.

“High-income settings may not be motivated by financial resources in the same way as their low-income counterparts. An adaptable incentive regime is therefore needed, with sanctions such as public reprimands, economic sanctions, or denial of benefits,” they wrote in an essay discussing the pandemic treaty.

As previously reported by The Counter Signal, the WHO began drafting its treaty in December 2021 during a special session entitled “The World Together.”

The treaty is to be upheld by the WHO’s constitution, which under Article 19 “[provides] the World Health Assembly with the authority to adopt conventions or agreements on any matter within WHO’s competence.” [Emphasis added]

This authority was initially designed to pertain only to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control but is being expanded to include dictating Member States’ future pandemic responses.

“When there is a health crisis or a pandemic like we’ve just been through, the World Health Organization will be able to dictate terms,” author Nick Corbishley said during an interview with The Epoch Times.

“They will be able to tell countries, more or less, how to respond.”

As pointed out by MP Leslyn Lewis, the treaty would also allow the WHO to determine what is a pandemic and when one is occurring, even over something non-viral like an obesity crisis. This would effectively give the organization the authority to take control of member states’ healthcare systems whenever they feel necessary.

“Of even more concern, if this treaty is enshrined, the WHO would be in full control over what gets called a pandemic,” Lewis wrote in a statement. “They could dictate how our doctors can respond, which drugs can and can’t be used, or which vaccines are approved. We would end up with a one-size-fits-all approach for the entire world… A one-size-fits-all response to a health crisis doesn’t even work across Canada, let alone the entire globe.”

Additionally, the World Health Organization (WHO) has contracted German-based Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Systems to develop a global vaccine passport system, with plans to link every person on the planet to a QR code digital ID — this vaccine passport may enable the WHO and member states to track individual compliance with whatever regulations the WHO chooses to impose.

To this end, the World Health Assembly met to address the benefits of developing the WHO pandemic treaty. One of the topics discussed is helping member states with “strengthening of compliance” with international health regulations.

“Many Member States expressed a desire to prioritize the strengthening of compliance and recognized the importance of providing incentives for implementation and assistance to respond, but there remains divergence on how best to do that as part of strengthening the IHR (2005) or as part of a new instrument,” a 2021 report reads.

WHA further states that member states “recognize the need for national and global coordinated actions to address the misinformation, disinformation and stigmatization that undermine public health.”

The WHA met on March 1 and will meet again in August to continue drafting the treaty, which they hope to implement by 2024.