Chelsea Clinton pushes more pandemic powers for WHO

Chelsea Clinton and a group of fellow globalists are pushing for a World Health Organization-led power grab – lavishly funded by American taxpayers in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The global health crisis we have been facing can be turned into a historical opportunity to construct an equitable global health and human rights architecture that advances health security and justice,” declared the former First Daughter and nine highly credentialed public health advocates in the Jan. 14 edition of The Lancet, the venerable peer-reviewed medical journal.

The dense, 12-page treatise, “Human rights and the COVID-19 pandemic: a retrospective and prospective analysis,” demands a “global funding mechanism” to extract $48 billion a year – equivalent to the entire American foreign aid budget in 2021 – from the US and other wealthy nations for “public health emergency spending.”

“This means vastly more funding from high-income countries to support low-income and middle-income countries,” the group wrote, without providing a specific formula for national contributions.

Some of that cash would bankroll a “global equitable distribution facility” for medical supplies, treatments, and vaccines – sending precious materials to poorer nations ahead of Americans in need, and potentially handing fat contracts to well-connected health nonprofits.

But critics warned the global quasi-government entity envisioned by lead author Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown Law professor and WHO apologist, could threaten personal freedom and US sovereignty.

“’Equitable’ means … discrimination based on race to redistribute services,” Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher Rufo told The Post. “‘Global’ is the idea that … authority should be relinquished from national authority. So people like Chelsea Clinton could make decisions outside the democratic process.”

The group also calls for an international effort to “address misinformation,” instructing WHO to bully social media companies into stamping out dissent: “WHO could also make the expectations of social media and other distribution platforms clearer.”

But given the repeated COVID flip-flops of Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top US health officials, “what exactly is misinformation? And then, who decides?” wondered Heritage Foundation fellow Brian Schaeffer.

“Under the patina of protecting people, they may actually be stifling helpful debate,” he said.

Chelsea Clinton, 42, who holds a master’s degree in public health from Columbia, contributed to the essay as vice chair of the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, the sprawling nonprofit established by her parents in 2001 to tackle HIV/AIDS, global warming, world hunger, and other crises.

But donations to the family foundation fell sharply after Hillary Clinton left her post as President Obama’s secretary of state, then plummeted when she lost her 2016 White House bid.

Their annual haul, which peaked at $246 million in 2009, sank to just $16 million – a 93% drop — in 2020, the most recent figure available.

“The Clinton Foundation has been since the beginning all about ‘health governance,’ that is, collaborating with international organizations and national governments to shape health policy,” said Peter Schweizer, author of the book “Clinton Cash.”

“This often involves lucrative contracts and ‘public-private partnerships’ that benefit big donors to the Clinton Foundation,” Schweizer said.

Chelsea Clinton draws no salary from the foundation, according to its most recent tax filings — but she does get perks like first-class flights on the donors’ dime.

Clinton did not respond to a request for comment.

The essay published online in November, and appeared just ahead of last month’s closed-door meetings of WHO’s Intergovernmental Negotiating Body in Geneva, Switzerland, where representatives of 194 countries drafted a pandemic treaty set to be publicly unveiled in February.

The treaty, proposed in 2021, could potentially remake international law to give WHO broad authority over travel rules, vaccines, intellectual property, and more in a future pandemic.

The pandemic treaty will likely draw intense Republican opposition. At least 16 GOP senators blasted WHO mismanagement in 2022 as they signed on to Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson’s bill demanding a supermajority two-thirds Senate vote for its ratification.

“It could attempt to establish a right to health as sort of a super-right above other rights, such as the right to property or the right to free expression,” said Schaeffer.