Pandemic Agreement must be followed by bold action for equity
After three years of negotiations, countries have reached a consensus on the Pandemic Agreement – but much of the hard work remains.TWN’s statement calls for urgent, concrete action to ensure equity is not left behind in the next phase.
20250415_TWN Statement_Pandemic Agreement Must Be Followed by Bold Action for Equity
After three years of negotiations and an intense final session on Tuesday, 15 April, 2025, Member States have concluded negotiations on the Pandemic Agreement. While reaching consensus is a notable achievement, it is equally important to recognize that the outcome lacks the ambition needed to meaningfully address the deep inequities laid bare by COVID-19 and other health emergencies—the very injustices that prompted the launch of these negotiations—and falls short of ensuring they are not repeated in the future.
While the agreement may provide a broad framework, critical details have been deferred—particularly to the forthcoming negotiations on the Pathogen and Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) instrument that will be an Annex to the Pandemic Agreement.
We stress that the development of this annex must not repeat the deficiencies of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) process such as INB Bureau text edits rather than Member driven text proposals, Members negotiating with the INB Bureau rather than among themselves, rushed timeliness and lack of transparency, all of which hampered what was supposed to be a Member State-led treaty negotiation process.
Crucially, the PABS instrument must deliver rapid and timely equitable access to vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics by ensuring legally binding commitments on manufacturers accessing materials and sequence information of pathogens with pandemic potential. For pandemic emergencies, Article 12 addressed this aspect in its paragraph 6, but no guarantee of access has been provided for public health emergencies of international concern (PHEIC) and for outbreaks to prevent them.
These issues must be resolved with clear, concrete obligations—including defined minimum percentage allocations to the WHO—to enable timely and effective responses to health emergencies. Without such specificity, we risk repeating the stark inequalities witnessed during previous outbreaks and PHEICs, where sharing of materials and sequences from the Global South failed to result in fair or timely access to vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics.
Provisions on technology transfer and building geographically diverse R&D capacities are framed in non-binding language, with no mandatory obligations on the holders of knowledge or intellectual property. Similarly, the Pandemic Agreement does not guarantee financial or technological resources that will be needed to implement Articles 4 and 5, on pandemic prevention and surveillance including through an One Health Approach.The Pandemic Agreement should be seen as an effort towards bridging global inequities and fostering genuine international collaboration for pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response—an imperative grounded in the principle that no one is safe until everyone is safe. The next step towards realizing equity is for WHO Members to agree to a PABS Annex that provides legal certainty on fair and equitable benefit sharing from all users of the PABS system, developing operational details for global supply chain logistics network, and operationalizing the financial mechanism.
https://twn.my/files/20250415_TWN%20Statement_Pandemic%20Agreement%20End%20of%20Negotiations.pdf