International Health Regulations 2005

Debate between Mark Francois and Christopher Chope

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—