Georgia allows political parties to put survey questions on the ballots for primary elections. The GOP has a nice collection of 8 strange and scary questions to keep their constituents in a state of agitation. Some cover your standard policy questions like you may expect from a normal political party (taxes, gambling, lobbyists); some feed into long-standing fear-mongering campaigns (elections, immigration); but the last one stood out as particularly paranoid and bizarre:
Do you believe unelected and unaccountable international bureaucrats, like the UN controlled World Health Organization (WHO), should have complete control over management of future pandemics in the United States and authority to regulate your healthcare and personal health choices?
At first I had no idea what they were going on about. Did they think that the WHO had this power? But then I read up a little more, and it seems that this is a reference to various conspiracy theories around efforts to expanding international cooperation in preparation for the next pandemic threat. FactCheck (Annenberg) and PoliticFact (Poynter) have both written about these conspiracy theories and where they came from. This disinformation campaign has reached the point that the negotiators are concerned that they could derail the treaty.
I don’t know much about the specifics of this treaty, but I do have a general understanding of how the UN works (and by extension, the WHO), and this conspiracy theory is completely bonkers. The UN does not have a police force or army that could enforce any ruling, and the UN system is fundamentally based on the idea of national sovereignty, which is reiterated constantly for the simple reason that none of the signatories would approve a treaty that infringed on their sovereignty. The USA is in a better position than most to protect its interests since it has outsized influence on the UN. US law does include the concept of a ‘self-executing treaty’; I don’t understand Constitutional law or this treaty well enough to know how this one would be interpreted, but even self-executing treaties rely on the government of the USA to do any enforcement — they do not cede sovereignty to the UN. The only real ‘enforcement’ mechanism would be reputational damage.
The weakness of the WHO and UN is exactly why they were not able to perform a thorough investigation of Chinese laboratories. Congressional Republicans have harped on this fact as though it represented some kind of cover-up, but once people start talking about a way to enact some legitimate pressure to cooperate in future investigations, the Republicans go out of their way to sabotage it with a disinformation campaign.