Do We Need to Protect the Entire World Population from Health Threats Through One Global Biomedical Surveillance and Response System?

Abstract

The World Health Organization (WHO) and its member States are currently in the process of negotiating a new multilateral treaty on pandemic preparedness and response. At the same time, the existing international legal framework regulating global health emergencies – the International Health Regulations (IHR) – are being revised. Overall, substantive proposals made so far for inclusion into the new treaty/revised IHR provide for a further centralisation of control over, and management of, the collectivity of all human bodies through increased digitally-based biomedical surveillance at WHO level to detect potential health threats in order to rapidly adopt, coordinate, and implement global medical and non-medical emergency countermeasures. This contribution shows that this substantive focus is driven by the Global Health Security (GHS) doctrine that has dominated WHO’s, its member States’, and its public-private partners’ response to Covid-19. This is problematic because it will not only entrench the GHS doctrine further into international health law but also endorse and routinise many of the securitised global medical and non-medical countermeasures adopted in response to Covid-19 for responses to future health threats. (Emerging) evidence shows, however, that these countermeasures have been ineffective and resulted in far-reaching interferences with people’s human rights in virtually every country around the world. By way of example, this is illustrated with an analysis of three GHS-informed medical and non-medical Covid-19 countermeasures: lockdowns, constant bio-surveillance, and the fast-track development, global promotion, distribution, and administration of investigational vaccines. The contribution ends with a call on those responsible for the treaty negotiation and IHR revision processes to take due account of WHO’s and its member States’ human rights duties and responsibilities for human rights in these processes; and to question the exclusive focus on centrally managed, technocratic, biomedical approaches to pandemic preparedness and response. I. Introduction