(End of the American Dream)—The World Health Organization was hoping that there would be a vote on the global pandemic treaty at the World Health Assembly at the end of this month, but now that is not going to happen. Negotiations that were supposed to result in a final draft of the treaty have completely broken down, and that is great news because the treaty would have transferred a tremendous amount of authority to the World Health Organization.
But if dengue fever continues to rip across the globe like it has been, or if H5N1 mutates into a form that can spread easily from person to person, fear of what is coming next could potentially revive the negotiations.
On Friday, the WHO publicly admitted that negotiations had ended without producing a final draft of the treaty. The following comes from ABC News…
On Friday, Roland Driece, co-chair of WHO’s negotiating board for the agreement, acknowledged that countries were unable to come up with a draft. WHO had hoped a final draft treaty could be agreed on at its yearly meeting of health ministers starting Monday in Geneva.
“We are not where we hoped we would be when we started this process,” he said, adding that finalizing an international agreement on how to respond to a pandemic was critical “for the sake of humanity.”
Driece said the World Health Assembly next week would take up lessons from its work and plot the way forward, urging participants to make “the right decisions to take this process forward” to one day reach a pandemic agreement “because we need it.”
At one time, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had such high hopes for the treaty, and he still insists that “anything is possible”…
Addressing a sullen final day of negotiations, the WHO chief insisted, “This is not a failure.”
“We will try everything — believing that anything is possible — and make this happen because the world still needs a pandemic treaty,” he said.
Since the treaty is dead for now, this means that the WHO will not be running the show when the next global pandemic arrives.
And we should be very thankful for that.
But it is just a matter of time before there are renewed calls for a treaty, because we are already seeing some very chilling things happen all over the globe.
In areas that have tropical climates, dengue fever is spreading at an unprecedented rate.
This disease is also known as “bone crusher fever”, and there have already been millions of confirmed cases in 2024…
Australian travellers are being warned of a sharp increase in a potentially deadly virus, commonly known as the ‘bone crusher fever’ — with more than five million people now contracting the condition – and cases almost doubling in 2024 alone.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) and 1Cover Travel Insurance, dengue fever — a potentially fatal acute infectious disease caused by a virus and transmitted by the bite of an infected mosquito — has seen a rise likely due to increased post-Covid travel and the El Niño climate cycle.
Earlier this week, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) reported that dengue fever outbreaks are happening globally, with a “higher-than-usual number of cases” being witnessed in Africa, Asia, Central and South America and The Pacific.
We have never seen an outbreak of dengue fever on this scale before.
And it is here in the United States too.
In fact, Miami has become the “epicenter” for the spread of dengue fever in this country…
Miami’s role as the gateway to Latin America has also made it the US epicenter of dengue fever.
Cases of the mosquito-borne illness in Florida have more than doubled this year compared with the same period in 2023, as unsuspecting travelers have carried the virus back from the Caribbean and Southern Hemisphere. Now, authorities are working to keep the disease from infecting the local mosquito population before this summer’s heavy rains turbocharge the risks.
Malaria is another disease that is spread by mosquitos that is causing major problems all over the world this year.
Could it be possible that researchers that have been purposely breeding tens of millions of mosquitos have made a huge mistake?
The bird flu is also making lots of headlines right now.
At the end of last week, officials at the CDC warned that they are bracing themselves for the “possibility of increased risk to human health”…
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a summary on Friday that it is preparing for the “possibility of increased risk to human health” from bird flu following an outbreak among dairy cows and two confirmed human cases.
H5N1 has already resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions of birds over the past couple of years, but as long as it wasn’t affecting humans most people weren’t too concerned.
Well, now it has been infecting cows all over the country, and 19 of 23 wastewater sites in Texas recently tested positive for the virus…
In Texas, for example, 19 out of 23 wastewater sites were found to contain traces of the virus between early March and the end of April, according to Texas Wastewater Environmental Biomonitoring. Meanwhile, the state has some 400 dairy farms, and just 14 herds have tested positive for bird flu to date, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
The bird flu has also been showing up in grocery store milk from coast to coast, but experts insist that we should not be concerned because the virus is killed by the pasteurization process.
But officials are warning us not to drink raw milk because they believe that it could “make you very sick”…
As the avian influenza virus, type A H5N1, continues to spread to an unknown number of dairy cows, health experts are informing the public milk and other dairy products are still safe to consume – with one major exception.
When a cow is infected with bird flu, high amounts of the virus can be detected in its milk. However, the pasteurization process kills off or inactivates the virus, the Food and Drug Administration says.
Raw milk, on the other hand, is not pasteurized. “Raw milk can be contaminated with harmful germs that can make you very sick,” the CDC says on its website.
Many scientists are worried that it could be just a matter of time before the bird flu mutates into a form that can spread very easily among humans.
Let us hope that is not true, because more than 50 percent of the humans that have tested positive for H5N1 since 2003 have ended up dead.
We live at a time when it has become so easy for just about anyone to monkey around with a deadly disease and release it into the public.
Personally, I am entirely convinced that deadly diseases will play a major role in reshaping society during the apocalyptic era that is ahead of us.
Our ability to create deadly diseases now far surpasses our ability to control them, and the fear that global outbreaks create will be used by those that wish to accumulate power for themselves.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
