By Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone dot org.

On 25 May 2025, after three years of negotiation under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO), the Pandemic Agreement was adopted. In reality, the vote was a provisional outcome of an incomplete treaty which postponed decisions on a number of contentious articles, including the required financing, sharing of intellectual property and biological samples, and transfer of manufacturing know-how and pharmaceutical products on concessional terms, to follow-up negotiations.

The objective of the treaty 'is to prevent, prepare for and respond to pandemics' and, to this end, its provisions will 'apply both during and between pandemics.'

Parties also committed to developing a Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing System (PABS), in the form of an annex to the pandemic treaty, through negotiations in order to promote rapid and timely sharing of materials and sequence information on pathogens with pandemic potential. In return, as part of benefit sharing, participating manufacturers would commit to donating a percentage of their real-time production of safe, high-quality, and effective vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics for the pathogen causing the pandemic emergency. An additional share of the products would also be made available to the WHO 'at affordable prices.'

The treaty cannot be opened for signature until after the PABS has been negotiated and adopted. It will enter into force 30 days after 60 countries have ratified the treaty. A party may withdraw from the treaty at any time after two years from membership by giving a one-year notice.

The beleaguered WHO hosted a total of six rounds of oftentimes acrimonious negotiations on the plan to run the global infrastructure for future pandemics. The original timeline had set a negotiated PABS to be adopted by the World Health Assembly, the governing body of the WHO, at its annual session in May this year. Instead, on 1 May the WHO conceded that even the resumed sixth session of the Intergovernmental Working Group (IGWG) on the WHO Pandemic Agreement had failed to bridge the differences. Accordingly, the Health Assembly will be asked to extend the mandate of the IGWG so it can present an agreed PABS system for adoption in May 2027. The next IGWG negotiating session is scheduled for 6–17 July.

The Risk of Institutionalising WHO Governance Deficits

The text currently under negotiation risks institutionalising the governance failures that defined the Covid-19 response rather than correcting them. It concentrates authority in the WHO without adequate accountability to member states, locks in emergency-mode assumptions about future health, and risks overriding the sovereign responsibility of national governments to determine health policy for their own populations. It would entrench existing inequities while burdening developing countries with unrealistic financial and compliance demands. It is therefore a bad deal for low- and middle-income countries, which make up the majority of the world's population.

To be clear, the talks are not failing because countries disagree—that is to be expected in any serious negotiation. They are failing because dissent on the parameters of a contested framework is being managed and deflected, rather than engaged and accommodated. The process appears designed to produce agreement using the language of creative ambiguity. When an agreement becomes a proxy for institutional success that masks substantive disagreement over purpose and pathways, the goal has shifted from 'getting it right' to simply 'getting it done.'

Rather than prompting a fundamental rethink, these concerns are being absorbed into incremental adjustments—tweaks to language, minor concessions on access or vague commitments to future flexibility. The concerns raised by Global South delegations reflect real structural tensions in the global health system between public and private goods, donors and recipients, and centralised control and nat...