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pandemic treaty
Despite False Claims, an Equitable Pandemic Treaty Would Make Us All Safer
We urgently need global rules and international cooperation to prevent, prepare for, and respond to the next dangerous infectious disease.
May 30, 2024
This week, World Health Organization member states meeting at the World Health Assembly are widely expected to extend negotiations for a new pandemic treaty after talks collapsed last Friday.
The political blowback and disinformation campaign against the treaty have been fierce.
Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) claimed the “WHO agreement may contravene the First Amendment.” It doesn’t. Twenty-four governors wrote to President Joe Biden raising constitutional concerns, none of which hold water.
The concentration of global vaccine manufacturing capacity in rich countries drives inequities.
More about disinformation later. What’s most important is that the risk of the next pandemic looms—just witness the spread of H5N1 avian influenza among dairy cattle and farm workers. We urgently need to shore up international rules to prevent, prepare for, and respond to the next pandemic.
The pandemic agreement would, in essence, strike a global social bargain.
The Biden administration wants a transparent exchange of scientific information in real-time, including surveillance data, notification of dangerous outbreaks, and sharing pathogen samples and their genomic sequences. Global rules on scientific exchange can help curb outbreaks at their source and detect dangerous variants. More importantly, these data are the lifeblood needed to develop lifesaving diagnostics, vaccines, and treatments rapidly.
This global social bargain also requires equitable allocation of medical products made possible by scientific sharing. And without equity, the Global South rightly won’t sign on.
We think of equity as a matter of ethics, and it is. But it is also the most effective way to stop the international spread of novel diseases before they become pandemics. Equity is central to rebuilding trust between the West and the Global South, which was shattered during Covid-19.
The concentration of global vaccine manufacturing capacity in rich countries drives inequities. As we saw with Covid-19, high-income countries pre-purchased vaccines from pharmaceutical companies, causing serious international vaccine shortages.
Building manufacturing capacity in low- and middle-income countries like Brazil, India, and South Africa would remove bottlenecks in global supply. But this will require sharing intellectual property, dedicated financing, and transferring technology from powerful multinational pharmaceutical companies.
The pandemic treaty would also address the “upstream drivers” of pandemics. Biodiversity loss, climate change, and chemical pollution all contribute to the emergence of novel diseases. Up to 75% of new or emerging infectious diseases result from “spillovers” from animals to humans. Zoonotic spillovers have caused most global health emergencies, like SARS, Ebola, mpox, and most likely Covid-19.
A “one health” approach ensures that governments take action at the interfaces between human, animal, and environmental health. This could mean global rules on deforestation, intense farming of animals, overuse of antibiotics, and the trade in wild animals, including wet markets.
But all these global public goods are at risk from a worldwide disinformation campaign aimed at derailing the treaty. False claims include the loss of U.S. sovereignty to craft public health policies. Yet, the draft treaty expressly affirms national sovereignty. Also, the WHO director-general does not have the power to require lockdowns or issue mandates for masks or vaccinations.
This year, more than 64 countries are holding elections. Elections in the United States pose a particularly virulent risk to the success of diplomatic negotiations. Recall that then President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from WHO, only to be reversed by Biden. There’s little doubt that a future Trump administration would torpedo WHO negotiations.
The next pandemic is percolating somewhere—whether in dairy cows here in the United States, in a cave in southern China replete with bats, or through the work of nefarious actors using novel technologies like synthetic biology to recreate or enhance dangerous viruses like smallpox.
More than 1 million Americans lost their lives to Covid-19. The next pandemic could be much worse. We urgently need global rules and international cooperation to prevent, prepare for, and respond to the next dangerous infectious disease.
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To Avoid Covid Inequities in Next Pandemic, Sanders Says WHO Treaty Must Put 'Health Over Profits'
"The life of a millionaire in New York City is not worth more than the life of a person living in extreme poverty in South Sudan."
Nov 07, 2023
As advocates warn of glaring inadequacies in a draft of the global pandemic treaty under negotiation at the World Health Organization, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday urged the country's lead negotiator "to push for the inclusion of strong reasonable pricing, technology sharing, and access standards" in the agreement.
"Now is the time to negotiate strong global standards that put public health over profits," Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote in a letter to Ambassador Pamela Hamamoto, U.S. negotiator for the pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response accord, a proposed treaty that 194 WHO member states agreed to draft in response to the Covid-19 emergency.
The WHO's Intergovernmental Negotiating Body is meeting from Monday through Thursday in Geneva to debate the latest draft of the proposed accord.
"The U.S. should champion including reasonable pricing and technology sharing requirements into all funding agreements with pharmaceutical companies," asserted Sanders, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee. "That is not just the right thing to do. It is the smart thing to do to protect the American people from viruses that respect no borders."
Sanders' office said in a statement:
During the Covid-19 pandemic, there were vast inequities in access to... tests, treatments, and vaccines. One study estimated that vaccine inequality cost 1.3 million lives by the end of 2021. U.S. taxpayers spent $12 billion on the research, development, and procurement of one of the leading vaccines. Yet, Moderna refused to share its technology with other manufacturers to increase global production, charged some poorer countries more for doses than wealthy countries, and then quadrupled the price of the Covid vaccine to $128—at a time when it costs just $2.85 to manufacture that vaccine.
"The mistakes made with Moderna cannot be repeated," Sanders wrote in his letter. "A public health crisis should not be an opportunity for profiteering. We need real international cooperation and commitment to ensuring equitable access to pandemic products."
"Our goal should be to make tests, treatments, and vaccines for the next public health outbreak available to every man, woman, and child who needs them as soon as possible," he added. "The life of a millionaire in New York City is not worth more than the life of a person living in extreme poverty in South Sudan."
The proposed treaty—a final draft of which is meant to be submitted for consideration by the 77th World Health Assembly in May 2024—aims to build resilience to pandemics; ensure equitable access to pandemic countermeasures; support global coordination through a stronger and more accountable WHO; and support prevention, detection, and responses to outbreaks with pandemic potential.
"The new accord could represent a global commitment to work together, as an international community, to help prevent disease outbreaks from impacting individuals, communities, countries, and the world in the same way as the Covid-19 pandemic did," the WHO explained.
However, Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned Tuesday that "the current draft fails to enshrine core human rights standards protected under international law, most notably the right to health and the right to benefit from scientific progress, therefore risking a repeat of the tragic failures during the Covid-19 pandemic."
HRW's position is shared by the Global Initiative for Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights; the International Commission of Jurists; and Amnesty International.
"Creating a new pandemic treaty could offer an opportunity to ensure that countries are equipped with proper mechanisms for cooperation and principles to prevent the level of devastation wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic, and the rights violations resulting from government responses," Amnesty legal adviser Tamaryn Nelson said in a statement.
"By failing to ground the treaty in existing human rights obligations and inadequately addressing human rights concerns arising during public health emergencies, governments risk repeating history when the next global health crisis hits," Nelson added.
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