Jonathan S Blake and Nils Gilman write:

‘Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world,’ Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared to the World Health Assembly on 29 November 2021, quoting Albert Camus’s The Plague. ‘Outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics are a fact of nature,’ Tedros, the director-general of the World Health Organization since 2017, continued in his own words. ‘But that does not mean we are helpless to prevent them, prepare for them or mitigate their impact.’ Exuding confidence, he proclaimed: ‘We are not prisoners of fate or nature.’

The topic of this special session of the WHA – only the second one convened since the WHO was founded in 1948 – was to establish international negotiations to reach a global agreement on ‘pandemic prevention, preparedness and response’. The delegates passed a resolution directing negotiators to begin work on a pandemic treaty to be ready to present for approval by the 77th WHA in May 2024. But, days before the assembly meeting was due in Geneva, word leaked that the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body had failed to meet the deadline. There would be no pandemic agreement.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. The diplomats, working 12-hour days, understood the importance of their task. Having just suffered through the COVID-19 pandemic, the stakes were – and are – exceedingly clear. ‘COVID-19 has exposed and exacerbated fundamental weaknesses in the global architecture for pandemic preparedness and response,’ Tedros explained. The only way forward after so much suffering, he urged, was ‘to find common ground … against common threats,’ to recognise ‘that we have no future but a common future.’ As the co-chair of the negotiations Roland Driece put it, reaching a global agreement was necessary ‘for the sake of humanity’.

Despite a broad consensus that everyone would be better off were we globally prepared, negotiations still stalled. The major sticking points appear in Article 12 of the draft treaty, ‘Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing System’. Under this arrangement, countries would be required to rapidly share information about emerging pathogens, including samples and genetic sequences. But the Global South justifiably fears that their costly efforts at monitoring and information-sharing will be used to create tests, vaccines and therapeutics that get hoarded by the Global North. Negotiators from lower-income countries insist that the treaty includes guarantees for equitable access to any pharmaceutical developments, something that wealthier countries are hesitant to accept. ‘We don’t want to see Western countries coming to collect pathogens, going with pathogens, making medicines, making vaccines, without sending back to us these benefits,’ Jean Kaseya, the director-general of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told The New York Times. [Continue reading…]