Has the international pandemic treaty lost its way?

Fears are growing that a huge collaborative effort to agree an international pandemic treaty has lost its way, amid entrenched positions and conspiracy theories.

With just months to go until the deadline for the deal, "wrangling and disinformation" mean that plans for a global pandemic preparedness agreement "risk falling apart", said The Guardian.

'Torrent of fake news'

Two years ago, and "shaken by the Covid-19 pandemic", the World Health Organization's (WHO) 194 member states started negotiating an international accord "aimed at ensuring countries are better equipped to deal with the next health catastrophe", or to "prevent it altogether", said The Guardian.

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In December 2021, the WHO got the ball rolling by reminding nations how the pandemic "ripped apart our social, economic and political systems and became a multi-trillion dollar problem".

So began efforts to build a "legally binding agreement" that "commits countries to monitor pandemic threats, beefs up their capacity to respond and sets out what nations would receive in return for sharing information on any disease-causing viruses or bacteria that they discover", said Politico.

It was hoped that the agreement would be unveiled at the 2024 World Health Assembly, the WHO's decision-making body, which meets on 27 May. But stubbornness and "a torrent of fake news, lies, and conspiracy theories" have slowed progress, said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general.

Among the "false claims" are that the pandemic treaty plans to "snatch sovereignty from countries by imposing lockdowns or vaccine mandates", said the British Medical Journal. But Tedros insisted that "negotiating members know that the agreement will give WHO no such powers".

Sounding a warning to the WHO's executive board in Geneva on Monday, he said that "time is very short" and failure to strike an agreement would be "a missed opportunity for which future generations may not forgive us".

'High-risk tactics'

A recent draft of the agreement seen by Politico indicates that countries have "shifted little in their initial positions on key provisions in the text", said the news site. A "central sticking point" is the so-called access and benefit sharing mechanism, which would see countries share samples of circulating viruses, which can be used by the pharmaceutical industry to produce vaccines. In return, the sector would donate cash "into a pot that is used to improve countries' preparedness and response capacity".

But several nations, including the UK, US, Canada, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates, as well as the European Union, have signalled that they aren't happy with all of the mechanism's suggestions.

Roland Driece, who is co-chairing the negotiations, said another stumbling block is that European countries want more funds invested in pandemic prevention, while African states are asking for the knowledge and financing to make that work, plus proper access to pandemic "countermeasures" such as vaccines and treatments.

Meanwhile, negotiators "seem to be holding back on any shift in their positions to the last minute", a "high-risk tactic" that is "not unusual", said Politico. But the "scale of the text, the lack of agreement on almost every aspect of it", and "the fact there are only two official negotiating sessions left" mean reaching agreement on the entire text at the "eleventh hour" would be a "substantial undertaking".

Jaume Vidal, senior policy adviser at the NGO Health Action International, said he fears that at “five minutes to midnight, developing countries will be forced to accept whatever consensus the EU and the US can live with".

James Love, director of another NGO, Knowledge Ecology International, is "still optimistic that an agreement will be reached", as long as countries "actually negotiate", said Politico.

But the "billion-dollar question" is what such a treaty would actually accomplish, said Devex. Experts in the global health field who are "following the negotiations closely" have argued it will "only be a piece of paper without independent monitoring and compliance mechanisms", it added.

The UK government was a signatory to the article proposing the treaty in 2021 and in 2022 it stated that it supported a new legally binding instrument "as part of a cooperative and comprehensive approach to pandemic prevention, preparedness and response".