While the next draft of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) pandemic agreement is due to be sent to member states by Thursday (18 April), it is likely to be stripped of contentious clauses.
Instead, the draft – and indeed, the pandemic agreement to be put to the World Health Assembly (WHA) at the end of May – will be an “instrument of essentials”; a basic text that will be fleshed out by further talks in the next couple of years, as reported recently by Health Policy Watch.
After the WHA has adopted the framework, more details will be fleshed out over the next 12 to 24 months. Thereafter, a Conference of Parties has been proposed, but sources close to the discussions say this is only likely to convene in the latter half of 2026 – so fingers crossed that there’s no pandemic before that!
The ninth intergovernmental negotiating body (INB) meeting, from 18-28 March, was due to be the last before the WHA. But there was little agreement between the key power blocs: the European Union, UK, Japan and US; the 34-strong Group of Equity (headlined by Bangladesh, India, Brazil and Indonesia) and the Africa Group.
After days of circular negotiations and countries’ loss of patience with one another and the INB Bureau, parties resolved that the agreement to be put to the WHA would focus on areas of convergence.
This has seen the text slim from a completely unwieldy 100-page draft on 26 March, with multiple opposing clauses contained in brackets, to the current 20-pager, according to insiders.