PolitiFact.com
Statement: The World Health Organization is developing a pandemic treaty that will remove current human rights protections, enforce surveillance and censorship and eliminate freedom of speech.
The COVID-19 pandemic caught much of the world unprepared. The respiratory virus spread quickly without proven treatments, protective equipment was scarce, and there were limited tests for the virus. To avoid a similar scenario in the future, the World Health Organization has been drafting pandemic prevention and preparedness plans — but those plans have become fodder for false claims online.
In one Facebook post, a woman in a video claimed the WHO’s plans would strip people of certain rights.
"We’re undergoing a soft coup," said a woman sitting behind a name plate that read "M. Nass" and in front of a backdrop that read "europarl.eu" — the website for the European Parliament. "The idea is to create a whole new set of laws and ignore the existing human rights laws and other laws under the pretext of pandemic preparedness and the biosecurity agenda," the woman said.
The United States and leadership of the WHO, a United Nations agency, she continued, were working to develop "a pandemic treaty and amendments to the existing International Health Regulations that will remove the human rights protections currently embedded in the IHRs," enforce surveillance and censorship and "get rid of freedom of speech."
The woman in the video is Meryl Nass, an internist whose medical...
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