Another reason to support President Biden — protecting our nation’s health
The United States must vote YES on the World Health Organization’s Pandemic Agreement, to allow it to begin its road to final adoption. Here in the United States, we lost over one million people to COVID-19. There is hardly a person living in the United States today, that was not impacted in some way by the pandemic. We must be thankful President Biden and his administration are working hard to see this doesn’t happen again. That we never again need to close down our businesses, our schools, and in essence, our country. That we don’t see hospitals overrun, and bodies stored in refrigerated trailers, because the morgues are full, and there are too many to bury, and give funerals to, at once. To ensure this doesn’t ever happen again, the President has had his administration working with the World Health Organization (WHO) and its 194 nation member nations.
The WHO, with the help of the United States, has been working on a Pandemic Agreement to enhance global cooperation and ensure a more consistent and coordinated global response to global health threats. The agreement, if eventually adopted, will enhance sharing of information about pathogens with pandemic potential, to ensure a more rapid and effective global response than we saw with COVID-19. It will enhance sharing of medical countermeasures, including vaccines and therapeutics, which will lead to a more equitable global response.
If anyone looks at the draft Pandemic Agreement realistically, they will see it is a matter of national security for the United States. Any thinking person understands, in our globalized world, where travel is so easy, pathogens, which can cause pandemics, easily cross borders. Through these new accords, which the United States is helping to write, WHO, with its 194 member states, is trying to get all their member states to share information with WHO, and through that, they will all then have the tools to protect their own populations. This in turn, will help protect the American people from pathogens, with pandemic potential, from reaching our shores.
This clearly seems like a rational way to proceed based on the information we learned from COVID-19. But it seems, in another irrational moment, and they have had many, all 49 Republican United States Senators, under the misguided recommendation of MAGA Senators Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA), and Ron Johnson (R-WI), sent a letter to President Biden calling on the administration to withdraw its support for any agreements being considered by the WHO at their World Health Assembly (WHA), being held this month. They oppose the WHO having any authority and potentially weakening the United States sovereignty. They clearly don’t understand the role of the WHO and most likely have not bothered to read any of the drafts of the pandemic agreements. Their letter clearly caters to their MAGA cult leader, Donald Trump, who thinks ‘America First’ makes us safer. It totally doesn’t, especially when it comes to a possible new pandemic, and pathogens crossing country borders.
Again, to ensure it is a positive agreement for the people of the United States, the Biden Administration has played a key role in negotiating the text of the Pandemic Agreement, to make sure it reflects the priorities and national interests of the United States.
Contrary to the MAGA Republican Senators misguided arguments for not voting to adopt the plan at the World Health Assembly on May 27th, this vote would not bind any country. Rather, it would simply start the process for consideration at the domestic level. That is when these Republican MAGA senators, and the people of the United States, can debate it. It would then only apply to us if we were to adopt it. Even then it would need a total of 60 countries to approve it, for it to come into legal force. Now again, these misguided Republican MAGA senators might have missed it, but even after it is approved by 60 countries it would, even then, only apply to those countries that approved it. So, the Pandemic Agreement would come into force for the U.S. only if, and when, the U.S. decides to formally adopt it.
If it were to be adopted, and I for one believe it should be, the Pandemic Agreement will be an instrument of international law, akin to other instruments against global threats such as the Geneva Conventions, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Paris Agreement, the International Health Regulations, and the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.
For me, this is another important reason to vote for President Biden. Remember the alternative. Trump once believed injecting bleach would solve the COVID-19 problem. I don’t want him, or the MAGA senators who wrote the letter, having control over my health, and the health of our nation.
