WHO Negotiators Fail to Draft Pandemic Treaty

WHO Negotiators Fail to Draft Agreement on Pandemic Accord; Way Forward in Hands of World Health Assembly. Two years of negotiations ended Friday without a final draft of a global agreement on how to best handle the next pandemic that public health officials say is sure to come.

After the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization was asked to write an agreement on how to respond to the inevitable next one and avoid the missteps and disparities of the last one.

“We are not where we hoped we would be when we started this process,” Roland Driece, co-chair of WHO’s negotiating board for the agreement, said Friday.

A final draft treaty was scheduled for presentation at next week’s World Health Assembly, the yearly meeting of health ministers in Geneva.

“This is not a failure,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in Geneva after the talks ended.

“We will try everything — believing that anything is possible — and make this happen because the world still needs a pandemic treaty,” he said.

The COVID-19 pandemic killed millions of people worldwide, broke health care systems and disrupted economies.

Tedros described the immense disparity between rich and poor countries concerning access to vaccines and other necessities “a catastrophic moral failure.”

The WHO chief is, however, keeping hope alive that WHO will come up with a plan to more equitably address the next pandemic.

“Many of the challenges that caused a serious impact during COVID –19 still exist,” he said.

Driece and Precious Matsoso, the co-chairs of the negotiating board, didn’t get into details about where the talks were stymied. But others pointed to differences about sharing information about pathogens, intellectual property rights and affordability of vaccines.

According to reporting by The Associated Press, developing countries worried about providing virus samples to be used in developing vaccines, but then not being able to afford those vaccines.

Some U.S. Republican senators protested to the Biden administration that the draft treaty contained “intellectual property rights” issues. And Britain said it would agree to the treaty only if “adhered to British national interest and sovereignty,” the AP reported.

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Jaume Vida, a senior policy adviser with Health Action International told AFP that the negotiators will likely present “the skeleton of the instrument to the assembly,” because “there is agreement on the principles and structure.”

Agence France-Presse said it saw a draft agreement of which a large portion was approved, but there were a number of other sections that had not been approved.

“Perhaps the ambition of doing this in two years was a bridge too far, the fastest-ever negotiated U.N. treaty, Ellen ‘t Hoen, a lawyer with the Medicines Law and Policy NGO, told the French news agency.

WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he is now looking to the upcoming WHA, when member states will assemble again, to define a way forward.

“Where there is a will there is a way, so I am still positive, despite the outcome. There may be hiccups, but I don’t call it failure,” Tedros said. “You have really progressed a lot and done a lot.”

He urged people to remember the harsh impacts of the pandemic and the need to prevent the recurrence of the same scenario again – although memories of that period now seem to be fading.

“I don’t know if there was any anyone who has not been affected by COVID,” he said. “Not only losing loved ones, but economic problems, loss of jobs, you name it. This impact was because the world was unprepared, and by the way, it still is.”

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‘Wedding at WIPO, funeral at WHA’ (WHO Negotiators Fail to Draft Pandemic)
The suspension of pandemic accord talks in WHO, came as members of another international agency, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) came to a milestone agreement on a historic new treaty requiring companies and other entities filing for patents to disclose the sources of indigenous plant as well as traditional knowledge, used in their products.

The new treaty establishes a disclosure requirement for patent applicants whose inventions are based on genetic resources and/or associated traditional knowledge. The treaty aims to protect the indigenous resources of countries, particularly developing countries, and will have wide-ranging relevance for new medicines, as well as cosmetics and other products.

“It’s kind of like a wedding at WIPO and a funeral at WHO this morning,” said Jamie Love of the NGO Knowledge Ecology International (KEI).