The World Health Organization (WHO) has released the latest zero draft of its international pandemic treaty which will give the unelected global health agency new sweeping surveillance powers if passed.
The treaty requires the WHO’s 194 member states (which represent 98% of all the countries in the world) to strengthen the WHO’s “One Health surveillance systems.”
One Health is a WHO system that aims to “optimize the health of people, animals and ecosystems” and “uses the close, interdependent links among these fields to create new surveillance and disease control methods.”
The WHO’s One Health fact sheet points to Covid-19 as one of the main reasons for expanding its One Health approach and states that it “put a spotlight on the need for a global framework for improved surveillance.”
