Co-chair of the negotiations, French ambassador Anne-Claire Amprou, and the WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus cheer at the conclusion of negotiations for a pandemic treaty on 16 April 2025. (WHO)
ON SOURCE: GENEVA SOLUTIONS
GLOBAL HEALTH WHO ACTU
Nations clinch pandemic treaty in sign that ‘multilateralism is alive and well’
By Michelle Langrand
World Health Organization member states have agreed on a plan to prevent, prepare for and respond to future global health crises – amid the glaring absence of the United States.
At 3 am on Wednesday, a three-year-long, painstaking marathon of deliberations finally reached a joyful conclusion. Negotiators at the World Health Organization (WHO) could finally catch their breath as they finalised a draft agreement on how to tackle future pandemics. Some 31 pages of text highlighted in green shared soon after the meeting ended revealed that nations had managed to set aside their entrenched differences and reach a compromise with one month to spare before the World Health Assembly, where health ministers are set to adopt the deal.
The agreement comes at a particularly turbulent time for the WHO, just months after the United States – its largest benefactor and a world leader in pharmaceutical innovation – announced it would exit the UN health agency and no longer engage in the negotiations.
Multilateralism ‘alive and well’
Countries initially gave themselves two years to hash out a deal, but deep divides between developed and developing nations dragged the talks into a third year. The Trump administration’s decision to abandon the WHO had stoked fears that the pandemic treaty would languish on the back burner. Ironically, the move may have had the opposite effect.
“The context of the US pulling out of the WHO and its criticism, gave an air of momentum to the process because it was no longer about global health, but about multilateralism,” said Ricardo Matute, policy engagement advisor with the governing pandemic team at the Geneva Graduate Institute’s Global Health Centre. “States felt that a failure would also be a failure for multilateralism.” A negotiator with the Chilean delegation up until recently, Matute holds this moment close to his heart, recalling that Chile was the first to request a discussion about such an agreement back in 2020 at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director general, praised countries for the achievement, saying: “In reaching consensus on the pandemic agreement, not only did they put in place a generational accord to make the world safer, they have also demonstrated that multilateralism is alive and well, and that in our divided world, nations can still work together to find common ground.”
A balanced compromise
Completing this last stretch was all but certain. “The worst is over but, anything can happen,” one cautious diplomatic source told Geneva Solutions late Tuesday, as talks extended into the evening. Indeed, a last-minute impasse surfaced between the European Union and developing nations over the longstanding issue of transfer of technology, with the western group demanding technology to be shared only under “mutually agreed” conditions. In the end, a “balanced compromise” was found, Matute said. Olivér Várhelyi, the European Union’s commissioner for health and animal welfare, called the agreement “a major step towards stronger international cooperation”.
Countries also reached consensus on creating a so-called Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing mechanism, through which manufacturers will have to commit 20 per cent of their production of pandemic-related health products to the WHO – 10 per cent as a donations – in exchange for speedy access to pathogen samples and genetic sequence data.
An agreement for equity
During the Covid-19 pandemic, wealthy nations hoarded vaccine doses for their citizens, leaving developing countries out in the cold. One of their demands was for the pandemic agreement to prevent that from recurring. Although the agreed-upon sharing mechanism falls short of what some, including South Africa, had hoped for, it still marks a major improvement. “This is way better than what we had during Covid,” said Matute, while cautioning that it is just one piece of the puzzle for an equitable approach.
Other crucial elements include the development of a Global Supply Chain and Logistics Network, which will oversee the distribution of donated vaccines and medical supplies “based on public health risk and need”. Another key, yet less-publicised, provision requires governments to impose conditions on the use of public funding for research and development by private companies. “There are billions in public funds that aren’t tied to any conditions,” Matute noted. “When companies use that money to produce something, governments often have no legal tools to access or distribute the results.”
Precious Matsoso, the South African delegate who led the talks from the very beginning, said she was “overjoyed by the coming together of countries, from all regions of the world, around a proposal to increase equity and, thereby, protect future generations from the suffering and losses we suffered during the Covid-19 pandemic”.
Intense negotiations ahead
While the hardest part may be over, several steps remain before the agreement is up and running. First, nations have to craft a resolution to formally introduce the agreement at the upcoming World Health Assembly in Geneva. Some of the remaining sticking points have been deferred to the resolution that will require “intense negotiations”, said Matute. Among the most pressing issues is the timeline for the deal’s ratification – some prefer to wait a year to allow for the development of the sharing mechanism.
Once all hurdles are cleared, Matute stressed the critical role of civil society in ensuring governments abide by the deal, whose main weakness is that it lacks a compliance mechanism. “A lot of the commitments are also attached to certain caveats, so they will require a lot of political will to implement them,” he explains.
Another question that looms large is financing. Countries agreed to create a coordinating mechanism to assemble funding from World Bank-hosted Pandemic Fund and other existing bodies, according to Matute. As the WHO faces its greatest financial crisis and donors become less and less generous, finding resources to help countries implement the deal and protect the world from a pandemic will be challenging.
WHO Pandemic treaty
ON SOURCE: GENEVA SOLUTIONS