Talks on the World Health Organization’s pandemic agreement have stalled in Geneva over the one annex still unsettled, Health Policy Watch reported. The sticking point is the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing system, known as PABS, the last outstanding part of the pandemic agreement that member states agreed in principle last year. Negotiators returned for the sixth meeting of the Intergovernmental Working Group, the IGWG, and moved almost nothing.
KM Gopakumar of the Third World Network told the outlet that only one portion of a single paragraph had been agreed since the sixth meeting opened on Monday. Diplomats call an agreed passage “greened”, and by that measure the week produced almost no green. The opening session went backwards rather than forwards. African states rejected the latest draft from the IGWG Bureau, and a closed session then decided to revert to the earlier text carried over from the fifth meeting, Health Policy Watch reported, citing Professor Lauren Paremoer of the People’s Health Movement.
What the annex is meant to fix
The PABS system is meant to settle who gets what when a dangerous pathogen is shared. Countries that hand over samples and genetic sequence data would, in return, get access to the vaccines, treatments and tests built from that material, the products the talks call VTDs. African states want that bargain written down. They are pressing for a guarantee that contributing pathogen information earns access to the resulting products, and for the annex to require standard contracts with pharmaceutical companies setting out the terms, Health Policy Watch reported.
Several European governments, home to much of the pharmaceutical industry, have resisted, Health Policy Watch reported. They argue that compulsory benefit-sharing could slow research and development, and they oppose mandatory standard contracts. Gopakumar said the looser wording leaves companies “a lot of wriggle room” to set their own terms. Some European delegations also favour letting parties use pathogen data without registering as a PABS user, a route civil society groups say would let firms take the information and skip the duty to share what comes back.
The timing of any hand-back is disputed as well. Health Policy Watch reported that the current draft would have the WHO receive a 10 per cent donation of vaccines or medicines from participating companies only once a pandemic is formally declared, and not during the lower tier of alert known as a public health emergency of international concern. That gap, critics say, would leave the early weeks of an outbreak uncovered.
The push for a vote
Some negotiators now want to break the deadlock by voting rather than waiting for consensus, Health Policy Watch reported. Pedro Villardi of Public Services International, a union federation that says more than half its 30 million members are health and care workers, warned that a weak system would repeat the last emergency. Without binding commitments, he said, frontline workers “will not receive priority access” to VTDs when the next pandemic arrives. Villardi asked why the parties did not simply vote, and pointed to precedents: a vote at the WHO Executive Board in February, and the creation of the Essential Medicines List by ballot years ago.
Guilherme Faviero, who directs the AIDS Healthcare Foundation Global Public Health Institute, said member states were under pressure to accept “a stripped-down annex” without meaningful benefit-sharing. He put the blame on what he called the “delaying tactics of the European bloc”, and framed the annex as the fix for a failure exposed in the last pandemic, when samples crossed borders quickly and the resulting technology did not. Alessandra Tisi of the Geneva Global Health Hub gave the same reading, calling the position of the European Union and other wealthy states the biggest threat to a deal. The AIDS Healthcare Foundation has pressed Europe to back a binding treaty in earlier rounds, and the split on show this week is the same one.
Why a treaty fight reaches medical travel
Cross-border medical travel runs on the assumption that borders stay open and health systems keep cooperating. That assumption broke in the last pandemic, when closed airspace and export controls froze patient flows and stranded people mid-treatment. Medical tourism carries a logistical risk alongside its clinical and legal ones: the corridor can shut, and an accredited hospital abroad is worthless to a patient who cannot reach it. A pandemic agreement that fails to lock in fair access to vaccines and treatments does not fix that risk. It leaves the same scramble for supply that shut corridors last time. The WHO has logged real gains in global health even as its funding has fallen, which is the backdrop these talks play out against.
The near-term test is procedural. Whether the working group can green more than a paragraph, and whether the push to vote gathers enough states to force one, will be visible in the next session’s record. If the annex ships stripped of binding contracts and firm access rules, the treaty will have settled the wording without settling the thing it was written to settle.