WHO Pandemic Treaty Debate [Senator Matt Canavan]

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Senator Canavan calls out the WHO’s involvement in the lab-leak cover-up, Peter Daszak, EcoHealth Alliance, the famous Lancet Letter, and other atrocities. I’ve fully referenced and transcribed the speech.

WHO Pandemic Treaty Debate [Senator Matt Canavan]

Livestreamed yesterday 27 March 2023 Full Debate on YouTube | Rumble-Clip | Telegram-Clip

Madam Acting Deputy President, I support this referral because we shouldn’t be signing an international treaty with the World Health Organization. We should be getting out of the World Health Organization because of their negligent handling of the coronavirus pandemic. It surprises me that very few people have actually raised in this debate the record of the World Health Organization over the past few years. There’s a lot of emotion now in light of lockdowns and vaccine mandates and what have you, but people have forgotten the initial stages of the pandemic and the mistakes, the gross errors of judgment that the World Health Organization presided over and it’s absolutely ridiculous that they have and no one has been held to account in the WHO for those errors and mistakes which probably cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people their lives.

In fact, the head of the WHO is still the same person as at the start of the pandemic, even though at the start of the pandemic, well all forget now, at the start of the pandemic, the WHO was saying there was nothing to see here. There was no problem. On January 14th, 2020, the World Health Organization tweeted, and I quote, January 14th, 2020, we were starting to learn about this thing called coronavirus and we’re starting to learn about this thing called COVID-19. Governments, I know our government here in Australia at the time, the coastal government were considering border restrictions against travel to and from China, and at that time, at that very moment, when this was quite topical and having to make serious decisions about protecting our own citizens, the WHO tweeted out, January 14th, 2020, “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus identified in Wuhan, China.” (01)

That’s what they said, that’s what they said. There was nothing to see here, there was no airborne transmission, there was no human-to-human transmission, you don’t need to close your borders. In fact, they doubled down on that as we were in the weeks to follow discussing a border closure to China, the Australian government was one of the first countries in the world to do that, and I think it’s that decision and almost that decision alone which prevented a wider COVID spread at that time. We made that decision on January 29th, 2020, just two weeks after that tweet. But as late as February 3rd, 2020, the WHO is a headline or a news article on the February 3rd, 2020, WHO chief urges countries not to close borders to foreigners from China. (02)

I mean, how is this organization got any credibility?

There’s people coming in here saying, “We’re going to listen to the science, we’ve got to listen to the WHO. They know it all.” Well, if we listened to the WHO in February and January 2020, this country would have had a massive COVID outbreak. A massive COVID outbreak because we still would have had flights going to and from Wuhan. We would have been in the same boat as almost every other country in the world. We were very lucky that for whatever reason, COVID wasn’t circulating in a widespread manner here in January and February 2020, probably because we didn’t go to those military games in October the year before. Australia and New Zealand were a few countries that didn’t go. Major countries didn’t go to the military games in Wuhan in late 2019, and so we got lucky there. But we would have been very, very unlucky if we had actually listened to the WHO.

So, for those advocating for saying somehow the WHO was sacrosanct and this Oracle of science that must never be disagreed with, can you please explain to me whether or not you would have followed the WHO advice in February 2020? Did you support or agree with the Australian government’s very tough and critical decision to close our borders to China at the time? Because if you did agree with that decision at the time, you were going directly against the advice of the WHO.

So, you can’t hold both positions. You can’t say the WHO is infallible, but at the same time, agree and think that we made the right decisions there in COVID.

I mean, their advice goes on, of course, later on in March 2020. Just the next month, WHO says… this was reported in CNN, WHO stands by recommendation to not wear masks if you are not sick or not caring for someone who is sick. (03)

We remember that? Hardly anyone remembers now, we’re all sort of it’s all gone down the memory hole. The WHO, for months in early 2020, right up really to late 2020, were saying, “No, no, need for masks. Don’t wear masks. So, don’t do anything.”

Now, as it turns out, they’ll probably right the first time.

Later on, the WHO was saying we all got to wear masks, and you’ve got to force people to do it. But this also shows that there’s no such thing as the design. Science evolves. Science changes all the time, including in response to something as severe as a pandemic. So, it’s ridiculous to say somehow an international treaty or an unelected group of health officials should be the gold standard and should effectively run the response to any kind of pandemic.

Of course, the WHO were at first that weren’t in favor of lockdowns or border closures, as per most of the health advice. We did have coronavirus plans. We had communicable disease plans in this country and many others, and those plans almost invariably said not to lock down a society in the face of airborne transmission of a transmissible disease. But we went and did it, and originally, WHO said we shouldn’t. And then we did, and then the WHO said we should. We should lock down harder and longer, and all the time. And so what happened again to the science here?

This last few years was a complete failure of the scientific community. They did not stick to their original plans; they got spooked by the panic of TikTok videos from China with people falling over in the street. We don’t know where those videos came from or how that happens. It never else happened during the coronavirus pandemic, but we got spooked. The scientists got spooked, we all got panicked. I got scared, everybody got scared. We’re all spooked by it, and so science went out the window, and we all just responded by panic and fear. That’s what happened.

And this treaty, or allowing a treaty to entrench decision-making into a small group of people who just like every other human being, are subject to potentially paranoia and fear, is a recipe for more errors during a pandemic.

What we need during a response to any kind of crisis like a pandemic is the flexibility and ability of different countries to do different things, and then we can see what works and what doesn’t work. And clearly, over the last few years, thank God for the good sense and bravery and courage of the Swedes, because they did chart a different path. Under huge pressure, under massive pressure. They were called murderers and pandemic spreaders, variant creators, but they have come out trumps. The Swedish experiment has clearly worked better than us in the other in the world. They’ve got the pretty much the lowest excess deaths over the last few years. Lower than us, even though we were lucky that we closed borders and didn’t get COVID. We ended up, ended up three years later with a higher level of excess deaths than Sweden. (04) (05) (06) (07) (08)

So again, those who are saying they support the science, my, when I learned science at school, I thought the idea was we’d have a hypothesis, we’d experiment, we’d look at what happens in the real world, and then we choose the particular experiment or particular course of action which delivered the best outcomes. Well, clearly over the last few years, the approach of Sweden has delivered much superior outcomes to almost every country of the world.

But again, if we entrench the decision-making and power in this group, a particular group of unelected officials, they seem completely unaccountable. That will potentially remove that ability to have that level of experimentation, effectively kill science. It won’t be science; it’ll just be one particular hypothesis, and you won’t be able to compare it or contrast it against other approaches, which was a good thing.

Likewise, in the United States, with different states doing different things, again, clearly those states who didn’t lock down severely have ended up with much, much better human, much better health, and also better economic outcomes, of course, as well.

But before I go, I do want to make sure we, there is some mention of perhaps the greatest failing, almost criminal failing of the World Health Organization in the last few years with their gross mismanagement of the investigations the origins of the coronavirus or the COVID-19 pandemic.

There was, of course, a lot of controversy at the time about where this had come from. There was a lab in this place called Wuhan that was experimenting on coronaviruses, and then a coronavirus pandemic happens in Wuhan. It seemed a reasonable suggestion that perhaps this laboratory that was experimenting on coronaviruses, in bats, may have had some role.

But of course, anyone who suggested that the lab leak theory had any kind of merit was immediately described, like Senator Shoebridge just did then, as a cooker, or a conspiracy theorist, and all that sort of rubbish.

In fact, 27 scientists wrote a letter in The Lancet Journal, a very respected, or well, until now, should be respected journal. They all wrote a letter, these 27 scientists, in March 2020, claiming that anyone who did support or posit the lab leak theory was a conspiracy theorist. That’s what the letter said. The lab leak theory was a conspiracy theory, and in that letter in The Lancet Journal, there was, as there is in all articles in medical journals, a declaration of interests. And the 27 authors said that, and I quote, “We declared no competing interests.” That’s what those scientists had said. (09) (10)

  • Feb 19 2020, Open Letter Group of 27 Scientists open letter published in The Lancet We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” with references, drafted and promoted by Peter Daszak (11)
    • However an investigation into that letter shows a serious conflict of interest, identifying EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak (who has published studies with batwoman about bat SARS-like coronaviruses & is PRESIDENT of the company that was collaborating with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the genetic engineering of coronaviruses) as the one who drafted the Lancet statement

And so that letter was incredibly influential in effectively giving cover to the Chinese Communist Party and suppressing any discussion, any sensible discussion, of whether or not a mistake or otherwise from the Chinese Communist Party played a role.

Well, it later came out that letter was published in March 2020, and they declared no competing interests. It later came out, this is a headline from The Daily Mail in September 2021, “26 of the 27 Lancet Scientists Who Trashed Theory That Covid Leaked From a Chinese Lab Have Links to Wuhan Researchers.” (12)

Right, right.

So, we have all these, we have a senator here today coming in and so calling everybody a conspiracy theorist. We had scientists doing the same three years ago, too. Here we have scientists who were directly conflicted and lied about their conflicts of interest, lied about it, in an otherwise respected medical journal.

Where’s the accountability here? Where is the accountability? Why doesn’t that get mentioned at all? Why are you running a protection racket for clearly scientists who, if they’re not engaging in criminal activity, it should bloody well be a crime to do something like that. Because, as I say, it costs lives. It absolutely costs lives doing stuff like that.

What is worse than this, though? That’s just scandal enough. How does WHO fit in here? Well, one of those scientists, one of those 26 scientists, at one of the 27 who signed it was a guy called Peter Daszak.

Peter Daszak was the head of an organization called the Eco Health Alliance registered in New York. Ecohealth Alliance had funded coronavirus research in bats in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. (17) (18) (19)

  • The funding for the gain-of-function research being conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology came from Peter Daszak. Peter Daszak runs an NGO called EcoHealth Alliance. EcoHealth Alliance received millions of dollars in grant money from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (that is, Anthony Fauci), the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (part of the US Department of Defense), and the United States Agency for International Development. NIH/NIAID contributed a few million dollars, and DTRA and USAID each contributed tens of millions of dollars towards this research. Altogether, it was over a hundred million dollars. (20)
  • Since 2014, Daszak’s organization has received millions of dollars of funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), which it has funnelled to the WIV to carry out research on bat coronaviruses. (21)
    • In the first phase of research, which took place from 2014 to 2019, Daszak coordinated with Shi Zhengli, (石正麗), “BatWoman,” at the WIV on investigating and cataloguing bat coronaviruses across China. EcoHealth Alliance received US$3.7 million in funding from the NIH for this research and 10 percent was channelled to the WIV, reported NPR.
    • The second, more dangerous phase, which started in 2019, involved gain-of-function (GoF) research on coronaviruses and chimeras in humanized mice from the lab of Ralph S. Baric of the University of North Carolina.
  • 3 weeks before Wuhan announced an outbreak of a new form of pneumonia, virologist Vincent Racaniello interviewed British zoologist and president of EcoHealth Alliance Peter Daszak about his work at the nonprofit to protect the world from the emergence of new diseases and predict pandemics (The video interview was originally filmed on December 9, 2019.) (22)
    • At the 28:10 mark of the podcast interview, Daszak states that researchers found that SARS likely originated from bats and then set out to find more SARS-related coronaviruses, eventually finding over 100. He observed that some coronaviruses can “get into human cells in the lab,” and others can cause SARS disease in “humanized mouse models.”
    • Daszak at the 29:54 mark appears to reveal that the goal of the GoF experiments was to develop a pan-coronavirus vaccine for many different types of coronaviruses.
    • Based on his response, it is evident that just before the start of the pandemic, the WIV was modifying coronaviruses in the lab. “You can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily.” What he then mentioned has become the tell-tale trait of SARS-CoV-2, its spike protein: “Spike protein drives a lot of what happens with the coronavirus, zoonotic risk.
    • Daszak mentions the WIV’s collaboration with Baric: “and we work with Ralph Baric at UNC [University of North Carolina] to do this.” As has been suggested by proponents that SARS-CoV-2 is a chimera made in a lab, he speaks of inserting the spike protein “into a backbone of another virus” and then doing “some work in the lab.”
    • These experiments appeared to have included infecting mice genetically modified to express the human ACE2 protein with these chimeras (23)

The WHO selected Peter Daszak to play an influential role, to be one of the scientists on the inquiry into the origins of the Coronavirus.

I mean, how the hell did that happen? This World Health Organization that we’re a member of that we’re apparently going to sign a treaty with, where’s the Canada? Why aren’t we asking questions about this? We fund these guys, spend millions of dollars to the WHO. We ask them, the Australian government specifically asked them to do an inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus. We paid a big price for that in terms of China’s unreasonable and illegal transactions in response to that reasonable request. And then and then the WHO undermined the government of Australia’s position by appointing somebody who had funded work in the Wuhan Institute of Virology to look into whether they had started the coronavirus.

That’s happened. That happened. And we’re just sitting back and taking it like, what? Don’t we have any self-respect? Like this is the way they treat us, we’re giving them millions of dollars. They get hundreds of million dollars from the Chinese government, and they seem to completely whitewash any kind of link to China or whether this came from there. And they’re not held to account. The same people are in the same jobs. And that’s why I said at the start of this, it might seem dramatic, but surely we should leave this organization. If this is their record, if this is their actions and their complete unaccountability here. They’re complete, they’re complete, they’re complete almost intransigence in seeking to fix any of the errors that they have made, gross areas of judgment that they have made, and almost and if not criminal negligent activity here in regards to the inquiry they operated. Why would we still be involved with it?

I think we should have a body that coordinates on pandemics and health responses. Certainly, I don’t think we need to sign massive treaties or anything with them, but yes, we should have a body where people can come together and discuss these issues that obviously has cross-border implications when a pandemic occurs, but the WHO is just completely discredited. It’s totally stuffed up the coronavirus. And if there is not going to be a complete flush out of the people involved in these stuff-ups, then we should leave it and form some other body. Let’s create a new one. We can take our money with other like-minded countries and set up a different body with actual accountability.

Because where is the accountability? If there are other people who won’t support this inquiry which will just give a degree of accountability in the WHO, maybe we can get them into the inquiry and ask them, where’s our money being spent? What’s happening to it? Why did you get it so wrong? We could ask these questions. If they’re not going to support this small inquiry in this Senate into the WHO’s gross areas of misjudgement last few years, what are they planning to do to hold them to account? Like what? Where is the accountability? Because any organization that gets taxpayer-funded money from people powered in this country every day to pay for them, they should be held to account. They should be held to account to parliaments, elected officials, and others. Even if they had done everything right, they should still be held to account. I’d still support this inquiry if they’ve done everything right because sure we should have an inquiry.

There’s been a major, major thing that’s gone on the world, and the WHO have been central to it, but they clearly have not got everything right. They clearly made massive areas of judgment. They’ve clearly, if not been directly involved in a cover-up to the Chinese government, they should have known. They should have known Peter Daszak was doing this stuff. It was clearly and publicly available. He’d spoken about his research on bats and coronavirus in public forum that WHO should have known.

And yet they appointed a bloke that was irredeemably conflicted to hold the inquiry into the origins of coronavirus. We should not be funding the WHO. We should be getting out of this corrupt organization, and we certainly, at the very least, should be doing an investigation into them.

The Tale of Peter Daszak (30).

See all posts about the WHO Pandemic Treaty

References[+]

Penny (PennyButler.com)
Penny (PennyButler.com)

Truth-seeker, ever-questioning, ever-learning, ever-researching, ever delving further and deeper, ever trying to 'figure it out'. This site is a legacy of sorts, a place to collect thoughts, notes, book summaries, & random points of interests.