After more than three years of negotiations sparked by the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, World Health Organization member states have finally adopted a landmark agreement on tackling future health crises.
The accord aims to prevent the disjointed responses and international disarray that surrounded the COVID-19 pandemic by improving global coordination and surveillance, and access to vaccines, in any future pandemics.
COVID-19 killed millions of people, shredded economies, and crippled health systems. The agreement aims to better detect and combat pandemics by focusing on greater international coordination and surveillance, and more equitable access to vaccines and treatments.
The negotiation process grew tense amid disagreements between wealthy and developing countries, with the latter feeling cut off from access to vaccines during the pandemic. The agreement also faced opposition from those who thought it would encroach on state sovereignty.
“With this agreement, we’re better prepared for a pandemic than any generation in history,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at the decision-making annual assembly in Geneva.
“The agreement is a victory for public health, science, and multilateral action. It will ensure we, collectively, can better protect the world from future pandemic threats,” Tedros said in a statement.
“Citizens, societies, and economies must not be left vulnerable to again suffer losses like those endured during COVID-19.”
Countries still have to thrash out the details of the agreement’s Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing mechanism that deals with sharing access to pathogens with pandemic potential, and then sharing the benefits derived from them such as vaccines, tests, and treatments. Once that is finalized, the agreement can then be ratified by members, with sixty ratifications required for the treaty to enter into force.
Our collective pandemic experience, which serves as a grim and recent reminder of the havoc it can wreak, should give us reason to laud this achievement of world leaders and policymakers which intends to ensure better protections and a more coordinated response system are in place, when it happens again.
The agreement that took a while to be reached may not be perfect, but at least we can now count on a semi-coordinated response for such eventualities that are just a matter of time before another pandemic strikes.*
