International Health Regulations 2005

Christopher Chope Excerpts

Monday 18th December 2023 Westminster Hall

[Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

I, too, thank the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith) for setting out the issue, quite succinctly. I also thank her in her capacity as Chair of the Petitions Committee for having allowed us a three-hour debate. A consequence is that once all the Back-Bench contributions have been heard, we will be able to hear in extenso how His Majesty’s official Opposition will deal with this issue. Even more importantly, we will be able to hear the Minister, who I am delighted to see in his place, say exactly what the Government are doing in response to each of the issues raised in this debate, which are of crucial importance to so many of our constituents.

One of the reasons why we are where we are today is that the response to the debate we had on a petition on this subject in April was, frankly, totally inadequate. It was full of generalisations, and vague suggestions that somehow it was all going to be all right in a day. It really was, “Why are you bothering the Government with this trivial material?” This issue goes to the heart of what the House is all about. It is about who is in charge. Are we, as a democratic Parliament, in charge of the laws of our country, and any attempt by the Government to give away control over those laws to an unaccountable international organisation? It is because of that concern that so many people have signed this petition and we are having this debate again today.

If my right hon. Friend the Minister does not address these issues today, people will say that the Government are not taking this seriously. That would be a disaster. Once we have given away these powers to the WHO, which is power hungry—what international organisation is not power hungry? The WHO certainly is—it is very difficult to get them back. There are ongoing discussions about where we stand in relation to international treaties and international law. There is the insidious development, following the recent Supreme Court case, of what is called “customary” international law. That development basically means that a group of outsiders can tell us in this country what is good for us and what is not.

[Mr Francois]

For the avoidance of doubt, will my hon. Friend agree that none of us has argued this afternoon for withdrawal from the World Health Organisation—we might call it Wexit, for want of a better phrase—

[Mr Francois]

“Yet,” says another hon. Friend. But we want to be assured that the WHO cannot overrule this sovereign Parliament. That is a fundamental difference, is it not?

[Sir Christopher Chope]

Absolutely; I agree with my right hon. Friend. We do not want to withdraw; there is no need to withdraw from a voluntary organisation that is confined to giving us advice and providing data and information. Who would resent having access to data and information? Indeed, the essence of the relationship between a responsible society and its Government is that the Government should provide information to enable individuals to decide for themselves whether they want to take particular medicines, go on trips to particular countries, be vaccinated in a particular way, or whatever.

I see the proper role of the WHO as providing information to Governments across the globe. Those Governments can then decide for themselves what they like and do not like, having regard to the fact that the WHO’s chairman seems to have been imposed on it by the People’s Republic of China, and was strongly opposed by our Government. It seems very much as though the whole WHO is too beholden to China. The WHO is also beholden to some of its big donors; if one analyses how the WHO is funded, one sees that organisations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are significant supporters. He who pays the piper calls the tune. I think that is a good starting point when looking at these things. In the case of the WHO, there is too much evidence that the people paying the piper are calling the tune to too great an extent.

Once bitten, twice shy. Let us remind ourselves what happened during the pandemic. As others have mentioned, the WHO went into the pandemic with a policy of saying that lockdowns were not, and could not be, the right answer to a pandemic for all sorts of reasons. We can now see the adverse consequences that flowed from our country’s decision to have a lockdown, and we can compare that with what happened in Sweden. Then, during the early part of the pandemic discussions, and without any evidence being brought forward, the WHO suddenly changed its advice. Why? There is a suspicion that it was because of undue influence from the pressures that I have been describing. We will never know why it changed its advice. All we know is that somebody who changes their advice like that, without any evidence, should not tell us what to do. We should say, “If you want to change your advice, fine, but why do you change it? We don’t have to follow it.” However, under the proposed treaty amendments, we would have to follow it. That is obviously of great concern, because people can see what happened in the past, and that is potentially a guide to the future.

Even more sinister than the change in advice on lockdowns was the WHO’s approach to finding a treatment for covid-19 patients. There was a lot of evidence to suggest that ivermectin—it was not the only such drug—could be used to really good effect to improve outcomes for patients suffering from covid-19. Strong evidence suggested that treatment with ivermectin might improve someone’s chances of survival by as much as 81%, but the WHO intervened at the behest of certain pharmaceutical companies that were in competition with the producers of ivermectin. It gave very dubious advice, to the effect that ivermectin should be used only in clinical trials.

To those who are not familiar with too much of the detail, I commend a book by Dr Pierre Kory, a distinguished physician and epidemiologist—I think he is an epidemiologist. He certainly deals with pulmonary and critical-care medicine; he is a specialist in that. He was in charge of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, and produced a book called “The War on Ivermectin”. It was a war, organised by the WHO, against a remedy for covid-19, because, obviously, the whole vaccine development programme was premised on there being no cure for covid-19, and no effective treatment for it. In the absence of such treatment, it was legitimate for experimental vaccines to be brought into play without undergoing the full process set out in the Licensing Act 2003, because there was there was nothing else. We were in the desperate situation of there being no other way out. Actually, however, there was a lot of evidence to suggest that ivermectin—

[Dame Maria Miller (in the Chair)]

Order. I am sure that the hon. Member is not intending to use a prop. Let us leave it to Amazon to sell books.

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[Sir Christopher Chope]

I was holding the book as I was about to quote from it, Dame Maria. I was not trying to advertise it, and I have not contributed to it, although I have to admit that it was given to me; I did not pay for it. However, so that I can put it down, and so that people do not have to look at me waving it around any more, I will get to the quote. On the WHO’s recommendation against ivermectin, Doctor Kory says:

“The corrupt anti-recommendation that followed read like this:

We recommend not to use ivermectin in patients with COVID-19 except in the context of a clinical trial. This recommendation applies to patients with any disease severity and any duration of symptoms. A recommendation to only use a drug in the setting of a clinical trials…is appropriate when there is very low certainty evidence and future research has a large potential for reducing uncertainty about the effects of the intervention and for doing so at reasonable cost.”

That recommendation was given in the knowledge, as a result of work that had been done that, there was an 81% reduced risk of dying. Indeed, the reason that India was very successful in reducing the number of deaths immediately after the pandemic started was that it was using ivermectin in extenso. In the eyes of Dr Kory, the WHO’s refusal to endorse a remedy or treatment contributed to the loss of

“millions of lives across the world.”

Those are quotes from his book, which I will now put down, Dame Maria.

When I first read about that aspect of the work of the WHO, and the way in which it had been corruptly influenced by drug companies that had a direct financial interest in discrediting ivermectin, it raised alarm bells. I thought, “Hang on a minute, why is the WHO engaged in this sort of activity?” I hope that the Government will start looking really seriously, and sceptically, at the work of the WHO, and at the extent to which it is unduly influenced by external factors. A lot of its work is not based on straight science, but is actually political. Reference has already been made to the fact that the WHO does not seem too interested in getting to the bottom of how covid-19 began. Did it begin in a laboratory in China? That narrative would not fit in with the WHO effectively being under the control of the Chinese Government.

[Philip Davies]

This comes back to the point that our hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Danny Kruger) made so effectively. The WHO said, prematurely, that it was “extremely unlikely” that covid started from a lab leak. Then, over a year later, I think, the director general said there had been a “premature push” to rule out the lab leak theory. Does that not confirm the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope) that there are clearly external factors at play when the WHO gives its advice, and that it should be treated with caution, not as gospel?

[Sir Christopher Chope]

Absolutely, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for bringing that to our attention.

Let us reflect for a minute on what other countries are doing. I would have thought that we were one of the proudest sovereign countries, determined to ensure that our Parliament retains control over these sorts of issues; but we seem to have been sidelined by Slovakia, Estonia and New Zealand. If those countries have already come out publicly with their scepticism about the process, why have our Government been sitting on their hands, not saying anything? Instead of being mum about this, I hope that our Government will now say, “By all means, let’s keep the WHO as a body that provides advice, but under no circumstances will we sign up to anything that will give them control over our lives.” It was bad enough that we effectively had a requirement in this country that people should take vaccines—that there was a vaccine mandate.

I spoke the other day to a constituent of mine who worked as an inspector of care homes. He was told that he would lose his job if he refused to be vaccinated; he still refused, and he lost his job. I am pleased to say that he won his case in the tribunal, but that was the sort of consequence for people who fell foul of vaccine mandates. The prospect that it would not be our Government telling people what vaccines they had to take, but rather some unaccountable, foreign international organisation, is even more disturbing.

These are really important issues, and I hope that my friends in Government will take them a lot more seriously than they seem to have done up to now. It is still not clear whether the Department of Health and Social Care or the Foreign Office is in charge of these issues. As has been said, we need to know who among the Ministers will get down to the detail, argue the toss, and ensure that the WHO continues as an organisation but does not take control of our lives.

[Sir George Howarth in the Chair]

I am pleased to see you in the Chair, Sir George. If I sit down now, we will have just shy of two hours in which to hear from the Front Benchers—it is significant that there does not seem to be any SNP spokesman here—on what action they will take to address the concerns of more than 100,000 petitioners on this subject, and a whole lot of other people besides.

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[Andrew Stephenson]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that point. I genuinely believe that a lot here is in all our interests, and I do not want to turn this into a party political ding-dong. I genuinely believe that having us in Government leading the negotiations and getting them settled before any general election is firmly in the UK’s national interest, because I believe that we will deliver a treaty that is in the interests of all our citizens and respects national sovereignty. However, I very much hope that an incoming Labour Government would do the same. That is one of the reasons why I believe that we need to make rapid international progress to agree any revisions to the IHR—because I believe that we are in a good place to do that now and should move swiftly, rather than kicking it into the long grass. The last pandemic taught us that trying to make things up as we go along was not the best course of action. Laying some good foundations and providing some better certainty on how things will be dealt with is the best way forwards.

[Sir Christopher Chope]

Surely the regulations and the changes are not just one block that we either accept or reject. The Government can deal with each proposed amended change seriatim—one by one. That is why I hope that my right hon. Friend will spell out, in response to the points that have been made, exactly which of the amendments he supports and which ones he does not.

[Andrew Stephenson]

My hon. Friend tempts me, but he will remember that we did not provide a running commentary on the Brexit negotiations. We do not provide a running commentary on our trade negotiations. We do not believe that is in the national interest. Indeed, it is very clear that no text in the latest draft of the accord, published in October and available on the WHO website, has been agreed yet. The whole text is still under negotiation. The draft is just a basis for negotiations, and it will evolve. There are areas of the new draft that we clearly reject and there are areas that we would like to make even stronger. This is an active negotiation between 193 member states to come up with revisions to the IHR that we all believe, by mutual consensus, will be in our global interest.

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[Andrew Stephenson]

I hope that no Government would sign up to any treaty that it will not follow. I agree that, in a whole range of areas, countries around the world have sometimes not fulfilled their part of international obligations, but the UK Government will certainly not sign up to something that we do not believe is fair and proportionate, that is not our national interests and that we would not seek to follow ourselves. I share my hon. Friend’s concern that other countries have not followed regulations in the past, and there is no point in our passing strengthened regulations if we do not believe that other countries will follow them. We believe that the regulations are designed to prevent and control the international spread of disease. They are limited to public health risks and designed to avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade. That is why we support the process of agreeing targeted amendments to the IHR as an important way to better prepare for future global health emergencies.

[Sir Christopher Chope]

Can the Minister explain the process in relation to the amendments? He talks about consensus, but what happens if this country does not get its way in relation to some of the amendments that it opposes? Would that mean that, if those amendments are incorporated in the final text, we can and will opt out of them?

[Andrew Stephenson]

Yes, that is exactly what consensus means. To be clear, the WHO secretariat is supporting both processes by hosting the international negotiating body and the working group on amendments to the regulations, and by supporting the chairs to prepare texts and answer questions from member states. Both negotiations, however, are member state-led processes. It is member states that are negotiating; it is not the World Health Organisation. I completely appreciate that some see this as a WHO power grab, but it is important to remember that it is a member state-led process.

We came together with other nations through the World Health Organisation to agree a process to negotiate targeted amendments to the IHR at the 75th World Health Assembly back in May 2022. By consensus, we adopted process-related amendments under article 59 of the regulations. The UK supported those amendments because they increased the timeliness of member states’ compliance with future amendments to the IHR. That will better protect us from future global health emergencies. As part of the agreed process, member states could submit proposed amendments for consideration, and to that end a working group, made up of all WHO member states, through which the amendments would be negotiated and agreed was created.