Nigel Farage: We must be prepared to leave WHO over pandemic treaty
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Britain should leave the World Health Organisation rather than hand it the power to force the country into lockdown during pandemics, Nigel Farage has told The Telegraph.
The president of Reform UK described the WHO as “a failing, expensive, unelected, unaccountable, supranational body” that wants to “run roughshod” over nation states by dictating health policy to them.
The WHO is proposing a pandemic treaty that would be legally binding on all 194 member states, and is pushing for mandatory lockdowns and vaccinations.
It hopes to reach an agreement later in May.
The Government has insisted it would never hand over authority to the WHO over whether lockdowns should be imposed, but Mr Farage says ministers should be prepared to go further and leave the Geneva-based body if necessary.
He has joined forces with the international pressure group Action on World Health (AWH), which on Monday launches a campaign to reform the WHO.
AWH says the WHO has repeatedly failed to protect the public, by wrongly insisting in January 2020 that there was no human to human transmission of Covid-19 and by proving ineffective during the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa and the 2003 Sars outbreak in East Asia.
The group also wants to slash the WHO’s budget of £5.5 billion, mostly funded by the US, the UK and the EU, and prevent “mission creep” if and when the WHO uses future Cop climate conferences to make changes to the treaty behind closed doors.
Mr Farage said: “Let’s have a proper debate about what the WHO is for.
“We don’t want this treaty to be signed, we think the WHO should go back to first principles.
“We’re more than happy to have an early warning system for a pandemic and we are happy to help other countries but we will do it all on a cooperative basis, and if that doesn’t happen we should say we’re very sorry, it’s not for us.”
Mr Farage wants Parliament to debate the issue, and intends to launch a petition that will oblige MPs to debate the matter if it gets enough signatures.
He said the WHO “can be a force for good in the world” but had overshot its remit.
“It’s shocking that someone in Geneva that we didn’t vote for could force us into lockdown,” he said.
In the US, all 49 Republican senators have written to Joe Biden, the president, urging him not to sign the treaty.
They said it would be “unacceptable” to “expand the WHO’s authority over member states” during pandemics, adding that the WHO “did lasting harm to our country” because of its failures during the pandemic.
