After years of back-and-forth talks on how to best protect the world from the next pandemic disaster - World Health Organization Member States remain at a stalemate - with lower-income countries still lacking access to lifesaving health commodities and the ability to secure vital technologies and know-how during global public health emergencies - issues world leaders must rectify immediately.
As the 77th World Health Assembly (WHA) convened this year in Geneva, there was much anticipation as to the fate of the WHO Pandemic Agreement. For the last two years, Member States have been engaged in negotiations to create an agreement to prevent a repeat of the COVID-19 global health catastrophe - a human tragedy that is less about a virus and more about nationalist protectionism, corporate profit interests, and unacceptable inequity.
In December 2021, after the omicron variant was first identified by South Africa and Botswana, Member States voted to establish an Intergovernmental Negotiation Body (INB) to draft and negotiate a Pandemic Agreement. From the start, addressing equity has been a priority for countries, with calls for equity initially being made even among those countries responsible for many of the very inequities observed during the global COVID-19 response.
While initially seeming committed to being guided by noble objectives, European Union nations and the UK have since taken a stance of opposition against proposals aimed at breaking down intellectual property and other barriers to the equitable distribution of vaccines and other pandemic-related health products. This stance has caused an impasse in negotiations, and on the Friday before the assembly, it was announced that countries had failed to reach an agreement by its pre-established deadline of May 24. This, in spite of the fact that, as reported by legal scholars Alexandra Phelan and Lawrence O. Gostin, that “most of the draft treaty text was ‘greened’, meaning it was accepted by the parties".
During discussions on the INB, which took place at the WHA on Wednesday, representatives from Brazil pointed out that financing and equity are the key issues preventing the agreement. This isn’t surprising considering the stated position of powerful Western countries like Germany, whose Health Minister announced at the World Health Summit last year that an “agreement with ‘major limitations’ on intellectual property rights protection will ‘not’ fly for Germany and most of its European Union members.” This announcement was reported and described by Health Affairs, the leading journal of health policy research, as “a victory for the pharmaceutical industry, which has been lobbying hard to influence negotiations.” We agree.