Following the COVID-19 pandemic, WHO member states, including the United States, drafted a series of amendments to a legal framework called the International Health Regulations.
The IHR defines countries' rights and obligations in handling public health emergencies that have the potential to cross borders. It was last amended in 2005 after the global SARS epidemic.
The new amendments — from the U.S. — call for greater accountability and transparency in reporting and responding to such emergencies.
For the new more wide-reaching pandemic accord, member states have agreed that it should be legally binding for those who sign up, overcoming early reservations from the U.S.
However, the proposed treaty has come under fire on social media, from those who warn that it could lead to countries ceding authority to the WHO. The body strongly refutes this, stressing that governments are leading the negotiations and are free to reject the accord.
After five rounds of formal negotiations, the latest 208-page draft of the treaty still includes thousands of brackets marking areas of disagreement or undecided language, including over the definition of the word "pandemic."
With so many member countries involved, securing agreement may be tricky.
Andrew Bridgen, a member of the anti-woke Reclaim Party in British Parliament, this week criticized the new proposed regulations — pointing out that WHO had engorged itself on power during the COVID-19 pandemic, and granting the organization even more power was tantamount to a global loss of liberty.
"The very concept of the democracy that we have taken for granted all of our lives is under threat as it has never been before … across the whole of the world. It's not from external armies mounding up on our borders this time but it is from the corruption and the decay of our own institutions that are allowing this to happen," Bridgen said during an address to the European Parliament.
"I think every one of us who is elected represents our people. We need to remember that we are always the servants of the people. We are not their masters, and some of my colleagues and some elected representatives around the world have forgotten the lesson and need to learn this lesson again.
"We are entrusted to represent our constituents and their best interest and when their rights are threatened, we are duty-bound to defend them."
Bridgen said the WHO will "paint an illusion of nation states coming together to fight deadly pathogens when it's really as we've already heard, a power grab by an unaccountable elite rather keen to reinforce the power shift that has already happened in the global pandemic response to the COVID-19."
The organization "is an unelected, diplomatically immune, tax-exempt group that bears no resemblance to the good faith Florence Nightingale United Nations set up over 75 years ago," he said.
"Public health and the decisions surrounding it now exist as a monopoly of the WHO headed by bureaucrats in Geneva whose leadership has been embroiled in scandal after scandal and the majority of the influence on the WHO now is by external entities … so, it's basically pay to play. If you have enough money, you can influence the WHO."
Bridgen took aim at draconian WHO recommendations.
Bridgen said the WHO, led by Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is "not exactly the people I'd like to decide in the future whether my constituents are locked into their houses, whether they can see their relatives, if they have to wear masks and if they have to take mandatory medication.
"And any Parliament that decides to abdicate its responsibilities to its constituents does not deserve the name of being a parliament and does not need deserve a seat in in any elected assembly.
"We have no right to relinquish our sovereignty, the sovereignty of our nations, because it's not mine to give away — it's not for any of us to give away.
"Sovereignty always belongs to the people of every election and should be returned back to the people where they will again decide who they allow to represent them for the next parliamentary period," he added.
"There's no way we should be signing away sovereignty without the agreement of the people and that would take a referendum in each country to hand over those sort of powers, and I would settle for nothing less."
Reuters and The Assiciated Press contributed to this report.