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WHO negotiators fail to draft pandemic treaty
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Science & Health


WHO NEGOTIATORS FAIL TO DRAFT PANDEMIC TREATY

May 24, 2024 10:43 PM
 * By VOA News

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


FILE - A logo is pictured at the World Health Organization (WHO) building in
Geneva, Switzerland.
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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.

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.

Some information in this came from The Associated Press and Agence
France-Presse.

 * VOA NEWS
   
   The Voice of America provides news and information in more than 40 languages
   to an estimated weekly audience of over 326 million people. Stories with the
   VOA News byline are the work of multiple VOA journalists and may contain
   information from wire service reports.
   
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