GENEVA – A global treaty to combat pandemics like COVID will have to wait: after more than two years of negotiations, rich and poor countries have been unable — for now — to come up with a plan for how the world might respond to the next pandemic.
After COVID-19 triggered once-unthinkable lockdowns, disrupted economies and killed millions of people, leaders at the World Health Organization and around the world vowed to do better in the future. In 2021, member countries asked the UN health agency to oversee talks to figure out how the world could better share scarce resources and prevent future viruses from spreading globally.
On Friday, Roland Driece, co-chair of the WHO negotiating council for the agreement, acknowledged that countries had failed to present a draft. The WHO had hoped that a final draft treaty could be agreed at its annual meeting of health ministers, which begins Monday in Geneva.
“We are not where we expected to be when we started this process,” he said, adding that finalizing an international agreement on how to respond to a pandemic was critical “for the good of humanity.”
Driece said the World Health Assembly next week will take lessons from its work and chart the way forward, urging participants to make “the right decisions to move this process forward” to one day reach an agreement on the pandemic. because we need it.”
The draft treaty attempted to bridge the gap between COVID-19 vaccines in rich and poorer countries, which WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said was “a catastrophic moral failure.”
Addressing the somber final day of negotiations, the WHO chief insisted: “This is not a failure.”
“We will try everything – believing that anything is possible – and make it happen because the world still needs a pandemic treaty,” he said. “Because many of the challenges that have had a serious impact during COVID-19 still exist.”
The aim of the agreement was to establish guidelines for how the WHO’s 194 member countries could stop future pandemics and better share resources. But experts have warned that there will be virtually no consequences for countries that fail to comply.
Co-chairs of the treaty-making process did not specify what caused the impasse, but diplomats said major differences remain over sharing information about emerging pathogens and sharing technologies to combat them.
The latest project proposed that the WHO take 20% of the production of products related to the pandemic, such as tests, treatments and vaccines, and urges countries to disclose their agreements with private companies.
Earlier this month, Republican US senators wrote to the Biden administration, arguing that the draft treaty focused on issues such as “destroying intellectual property rights” and “overburdening the WHO”. They urged Biden not to sign.
The British health department said it would only agree to a deal if it adhered to British national interest and sovereignty.
However, many developing countries have said it is unfair that they are expected to provide virus samples to help develop vaccines and treatments, but are then unable to pay for them.
Precious Matsoso, the other co-chair of the WHO negotiating council for the pandemic treaty, said there was still an opportunity to reach an agreement and that efforts would not stop – despite the inability to reach an agreement on Friday .
“Let’s make sure that happens, because when the next pandemic hits, it won’t spare us,” she said.
Tedros, the WHO chief, said there should be no regrets.
“What matters now is how do we learn from this and how can we reset things, recalibrate things, identify the key challenges and then move forward,” he said.
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Cheng reported from London.
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