‘A significant milestone’: WHO member states finalize pandemic treaty

Around 2am on April 16 in Geneva, the World Health Organization’s member states finalized the draft of a global pandemic agreement. Aimed at strengthening pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response, the agreement took 3½ years of intensive negotiations. “Tonight marks a significant milestone in our shared journey toward a safer world,” the WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said in his concluding remarks.

If it’s adopted at the World Health Assembly meeting next month, the pandemic treaty will be legally binding for its 194 member states. The US did not participate in the final negotiations, since the Donald J. Trump administration has announced plans to withdraw from the WHO, effective January 2026.

“It is sad that a big player, the US, is not part of it [the treaty], but it is great to see that that has not deterred the rest of the world,” Marion Koopmans, a virologist at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, tells C&EN via email.

The April 16 agreement puts emphasis on promoting a “one health” approach—referring to the interconnectedness of human, animal, and environmental health—for pandemic prevention. This approach is crucial for surveillance, given estimates suggesting that 6 of every 10 diseases known to infect humans can spread to us from animals.

Under the treaty, WHO member states will agree to establish a system that ensures rapid access to pandemic pathogen samples and their genetic sequences. Such access can facilitate timely research and development of diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics.

Manufacturers that want to make such products must monetarily support the WHO system in exchange for access to data and materials. In addition, to ensure equitable access to pandemic-related products that these manufacturers develop, the WHO asks that 10% of the developed tests, therapeutics, and vaccines be made available to the organization free of charge and another 10% at not-for-profit prices.

The agreement “lays down a core principle: you cannot just ‘take’; there needs to be mutuality in exchange of information,” Koopmans says.

Another key—and contentious—aspect of the agreement is that of technology transfer. With the aim of achieving geographically diversified production of pandemic-related diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines, the WHO calls for facilitating or incentivizing technology transfer to low-income nations. The pandemic pact suggests using approaches such as licensing agreements, but such technology transfers aren’t mandatory.

Many low-income nations have argued that certain voluntary provisions in the treaty dilute the original intent of the agreement—to ensure global equity in access to tools needed to prevent and respond to pandemics. They worry about witnessing a repeat of the hoarding of vaccines and tests by richer countries that happened during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There is no ideal solution,” said Jean Kaseya, director-general of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, in response to a question from C&EN at an April 17 press briefing. “We cannot say we got everything we wanted to get, but at least we have an agreement.”