GENEVA (AP) — A global treaty to combat pandemics like COVID will have to wait: After more than two years of negotiations, opulent and needy countries have failed — for now — to develop a plan for how the world could respond to the next pandemic.
After COVID-19 triggered once-unthinkable lockdowns, upended economies and killed millions of people, leaders of the World Health Organization and other countries vowed to do better in the future. In 2021, member countries asked the U.N. health agency to oversee negotiations to figure out how the world can better share limited resources and prevent the global spread of future viruses.
Roland Driece, co-chair of the WHO negotiating body for the agreement, acknowledged on Friday that countries had not been able to produce a draft. The WHO had hoped that a final draft of the treaty could be agreed at its annual meeting of health ministers, which begins in Geneva on Monday.
“We are not where we hoped to be at the beginning of this process,” he said, adding that developing an international agreement on pandemic response was crucial “in the interest of humanity.”
Driece said the World Health Assembly will learn the lessons of its work next week and plan the way forward. He urged participants to “make the right decisions to move this process forward” to one day reach an agreement on pandemic control, “because we need it.”
The draft agreement was intended to close the gap that existed between Covid-19 vaccines in opulent and poorer countries. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called it “a catastrophic moral failure.”
On the occasion of a gloomy final day of negotiations, the WHO chief stressed: “This is not a failure.”
“We will try everything – believing that anything is possible – and make this happen, because the world still needs a pandemic treaty,” he said. “Because many of the challenges that had serious impacts during COVID-19 still exist.”
The agreement aimed to set guidelines on how the WHO’s 194 member countries could prevent future pandemics and better share resources, but experts warned that there would be virtually no consequences for countries that did not comply.
The co-chairs of the treaty drafting process did not give precise reasons for the deadlock, but diplomats said significant differences remained over the sharing of information on emerging pathogens and the technologies to combat them.
The latest draft proposed that the WHO should secure 20 percent of the production of pandemic-related products such as tests, treatments and vaccines. Countries were also asked to disclose their contracts with private companies.
Earlier this month, Republican U.S. senators wrote to the Biden administration, arguing that the draft treaty focused on issues such as “shredding intellectual property rights” and “overburdening the WHO.” They urged Biden not to sign the treaty.
The British Department of Health said it would only agree to an agreement if it was consistent with Britain’s national interests and sovereignty.
Meanwhile, many developing countries said it was unfair that they were expected to provide virus samples for the development of vaccines and therapies when they could not afford them.
Precious Matsoso, the other co-chair of the WHO pandemic treaty negotiating body, said there was still a chance of reaching an agreement and efforts would not stop – despite the failed agreement on Friday.
“We will make sure this happens because when the next pandemic hits, it will not spare us,” she said.
WHO chief Tedros said there was no cause for regret.
“Now it’s a matter of when we learn from this and how we can realign things, recalibrate, identify the biggest challenges and then move on,” he said.
___
Cheng reported from London.