The popular definition of insanity is "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." That perfectly characterizes a new effort by the UN, the Biden administration, and far-left foundations to expand the power of the World Health Organization (WHO). Negotiations for a treaty not only breathe life back into the discredited pandemic management policies pushed by Anthony Fauci and empire-building bureaucrats in the US but seek to make them unaccountable by having WHO dictate them to member nations without redress or debate.

Dictate is the operative word, too, because the treaty would also give WHO jurisdiction over "misinformation." This has echoes of the worst of the speech-suppressing policies pushed by Fauci, the State Department, and Big Tech. One of the biggest targets for that censorship, Great Barrington Declaration co-author Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, warned about this in a RealClearPolicy essay last week co-authored by Kevin Bardosh. The WHO's funding ask is outrageous enough, but the power grab is much more dangerous and insidious:

Read through the current draft of the treaty itself and you will find a whole section dedicated to “fighting misinformation.” There is no section focused on preventing harm. Those speaking out about these dangers have been subjected to harsh censorship. Once esteemed professionals were summarily fired for describing the reality of what was happening. The authors of the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration—professors at Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford—were subject to a “devastating takedown” at the hands of Dr. Fauci and top scientific bureaucrats at the National Institutes of Health and the WHO.

Public health came to resemble the police, and those pushing the new WHO treaty want to go further. It calls for more mandates, more vaccine passports, and more censorship—our new global health “Lockdown Doctrine.”

Proponents of the treaty would have you believe that it is merely a tool that countries can use to guide future pandemic response efforts, that it cannot trump national sovereignty or be used to force failed policies on entire populations. But the lifeblood of international treaties is not in the dried ink. Treaties are constantly ignored. Nonetheless, they do one thing very well: they create an illusion of consensus, signaling to those with power and influence. These priorities are then filtered down into national laws and plans where they can do tremendous damage. 

Dr. Bhattacharya spoke with me yesterday about the disastrous attempt to set bad policies and speech suppression into an unassailable and autocratic regime. The full interview is below, but here are some highlights of our discussion, cleaned up a bit from the AI-generated transcript. Both of us express grave concern over the rise of "scientism," specifically in the form of Anthony Fauci, as well as a refusal to apply any critical analysis to public-policy decisions in light of new data ... and sometimes old data as well.

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Q: You were one of the victims of the scientistic, and I use that term advisedly. It's not scientific, it's scientistic. Scientism as a sort of a belief system. And its high priest was a guy named Anthony Fauci. And to disagree with him or to dissent from him was an attack on science itself. And I'm not exaggerating that, am I?

A: No, he literally said that to some CNN interviewer. I mean, I was absolutely stunned, right? It's one of these things where like, you know, we religious types get accused of this kind of sort of unreasoned faith. But in fact, I've never seen even as a religious person, I've never seen anything more on reasoned faith than in the faith that people placed in Tony Fauci. Scientism is exactly the right word. ...

Q: The problem is that when you allow that type of dystopia to take place, as we did during the pandemic, when we allowed bureaucrats with MDs and PhDs to dictate all of our choices because we didn't know what to do, and you don't have accountability, you don't have debate over those things, you miss the truth.

A: That's probably the most shocking part of this World Health Organization treaty. ... You're absolutely right at what happened during the pandemic was a mass scale violation of the American First Amendment, you had government officials in the name in the guise of public health and the guise of protecting the public from misinformation censoring scientific debate, where the main people they censored were the people that were criticizing government scientific pronouncements, false ones, right? So on topic after topic, is there immunity after you get COVID? Is there such a thing as herd immunity? Do the vaccines stop you from getting and spreading COVID? Do the mask mandates do anything to stop the spread of COVID? Is masking toddlers a good idea? On topic after topic, I mean, does it make sense to like walk into a restaurant mass and then sit down and take your mask off and that'll stop COVID?

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We have much more below, so be sure to read it all. We compare the lack of follow-up from the pandemic to the Challenger and Apollo I disasters, for instance. We also talk more about censorship and its role in amplifying bad outcomes during the COVID pandemic, damage which impacted Dr. Bhattacharya and us directly – and continues to do so to this day. I fully expect that the Big Tech platforms will attempt to demonetize and flag this interview as "dangerous" simply for having a discussion about pandemic policy failures and the rise of "scientism" rather than actual science. 

Yet we must have these conversations, to rally opposition to bad policies and to stop any effort to enshrine them into international law. That is what self-governance and liberty provide us, and what the autocrats want to deny us. 

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Here is my full interview with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya:

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