Exclusive – Rep. Tom Tiffany Revives Bill Blocking Future Presidents from Unilaterally Joining W.H.O. Pandemic Treaty
Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-WI) reintroduced a bill on Thursday, along with nine cosponsors in the House of Representatives, that would affirm that the World Health Organization (W.H.O.)’s pandemic agreement is a treaty subject to Senate approval.
The ‘‘No WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty Without Senate Approval Act” was first introduced in 2023 and passed in the House of Representatives in September 2024 with bipartisan support. The version of the bill introduced on Thursday acknowledges the fact that the W.H.O. Pandemic Accord is no longer aspirational but an approved international legal instrument that passed the World Health Assembly in May.
“A significant segment of the American public is deeply skeptical of the World Health Organization, its leadership, and its independence from the pernicious political influence of certain member states, including the People’s Republic of China,” the bill’s text recognizes. “Congress strongly prefers that any agreement related to pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response adopted by the World Health Assembly … be considered a treaty requiring the advice and consent of the Senate, with two-thirds of Senators concurring.”
“Given the level of public distrust,” the bill text concludes, “any relevant new agreement by the World Health Assembly which cannot garner the two-thirds vote needed for Senate approval should not be agreed to or implemented by the United States.”
In addition to Rep. Tiffany, Reps. Michael Cloud (R-TX), Eli Crane (R-AZ), Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), Harriet Hageman (R-WY), John Moolenaar (R-MI), Ralph Norman (R-SC), Pete Stauber (R-MN), Claudia Tenney (R-NY), and Tony Wied (R-WI) are cosponsoring the bill.
During its annual World Health Assembly in May the W.H.O. adopted a final draft of an accord governing how countries respond to future pandemics. The effort was highly controversial from its start in 2021, to the point that even what kind of legal document the final product would be was a source of discord among its drafters. W.H.O. Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus referred to the document as the “Pandemic Accord” in statements celebrating its approval.
The final document directs ratifying countries to “promote and otherwise facilitate or incentivize, transfer of technology” related to the treatment and prevention of cases of the disease fueling the pandemic in question and addresses several United Nations preoccupations such as “equity” and climate change.
As a result of President Donald Trump withdrawing America from the W.H.O. on the first day of his second term in office, the United States did not participate in the final drafting session of the pandemic accord. Under President Joe Biden, who returned to the W.H.O. after Trump had withdrawn the United States from the agency during his first term, the U.S. engaged in initial conversations at the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) tasked with drafting the treaty. Biden representative Pamela Hamamoto stated in 2023 that the Biden administration was “committed to the Pandemic Accord” as a way of improving global pandemic response “for generations to come.”
Then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken also refused to provide a clear answer when asked in May 2024 if the Biden administration would submit the pandemic accord to Congress, dismissing the question on the grounds that the W.H.O. was nowhere near agreeing to a draft at the time.
Rep. Tiffany emphasized in comments to Breitbart News this week that, while the odds of the Trump administration signing onto the pandemic accord were slim, Congress had to act to ensure that future potential Democratic presidents did not attempt to sidestep their constitutional responsibility to seek the advice and consent of the Senate before signing a treaty.
“This bill would require Senate approval before any president can sign a World Health Organization pandemic treaty, now or in the future,” Rep. Tiffany explained. “With President Trump in office, we have the best shot to get this constitutional check signed into law.”
“We can’t leave the door open for a future president to surrender American control to global bureaucrats the way Biden did,” he asserted.
Past presidents have imposed international obligations through such agreements on the country without Senate approval by simply declaring that the legal instruments in questions are not treaties. A treaty is largely understood to be an agreement binding the United States to commitments to other countries. The administration of former President Barack Obama signed America onto two particularly impactful international agreements: the Paris climate agreement and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or 2015 Iran nuclear deal. The Obama State Department simply refused to identify the international agreements as treaties and did not seek Senate approval for them, with minimal pushback from Congress.
In addition to concerns about executive overreach, the lawmakers furthering the “No WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty Without Senate Approval Act” have also highlighted the many failures of the W.H.O. itself during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, arguably the biggest test of the United Nations body in modern history. The agency notably denied in January 2020, after substantial evidence of a contagious disease spreading in Wuhan had surfaced, that the then-novel pathogen was transmissible from human to human. W.H.O. chief Tedros discouraged travel limits on Chinese nationals to contain the spread of the disease and relied heavily on dubious Chinese Communist Party information to address the crisis. While doing so, the W.H.O. actively ignored critical intelligence from Taiwan, which notified the agency in December 2019 that it had reason to believe a new contagious disease was spreading in central China.
Of particular dishonorable mention is the W.H.O.’s investigation into the origins of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan. The 2021 report, the product of a belated investigation in the city heavily restricted by the Communist Party, found no evidence that the virus originated in nature yet insisted that a laboratory leak, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology or elsewhere, was highly unlikely. Tedros himself ultimately condemned the report, lamenting that the investigation was “not extensive enough” and later declaring that all hypotheses, including a laboratory leak, remained possible.
Following the approval of the pandemic accord in May, Hu Guang, an official with China’s National Disease Control and Prevention Administration (NDCPA), celebrated that China had been “actively participating” in drafting the agreement and that the final document was “guided by the vision of building a global community of health for all proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping.”
Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI), the chairman of the House Select Committee on China, indicated to Breitbart News this week that the W.H.O.’s poor performance during the pandemic and its relationship to Beijing made the possibility of joining the pandemic accord alarming.
“The W.H.O. repeatedly failed the world in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, spreading false information about the virus at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party,” Chairman Moolenaar told Breitbart News. “The Trump administration was right to withdraw the United States’ membership from the WHO and refuse to sign its recent pandemic treaty.”
“This important legislation will make sure no future president can unilaterally submit our nation to the WHO’s guidance, because the organization is beholden to the CCP,” he added.
Rep. Tiffany agreed.
“The bottom line is that the WHO proved it cannot be trusted with anything, let alone influence over U.S. pandemic policy,” he stated. “During COVID, it acted as a China-first mouthpiece. A single president should never be able to tie our hands to any pandemic treaty with this corrupt organization – not only because of what the WHO tried to do in its latest agreement, but because of what it may try to do in the future.”
