“Today, world history is written in Geneva.” With those words, the director of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, spoke last Wednesday 191 Member States. After three years of heavy negotiations conformity reaches a treaty that should better prepare the world for future pandemies.
Because although scientists have been warning for decades of the chance of a pandemic, the world was still attacked by the coronacrisis. Even while the virus was racing around the world, a painful conclusion signed up: the international cooperation that is actually needed to curb such a pandemic failed.
For example, China refused to share fair information about the origin of the virus and tests, mouth caps and vaccines were so unfairly distributed that experts even spoke of ‘apartheid’. Where countries in the global north had enough vaccines in the cooling to vaccinate the entire population four times, poorer countries did not have a single shot at that time.
With the growing realization that a ‘self-country-first mentality’ does not work in a global health crisis, the seed was planned for international, legally binding agreements to combat a next pandemic-and preferably to prevent it.
The concept text of the so-called pandemia agreement turned completely green on Wednesday night and can now be sent to the World Health Meeting. In May the Convention will be officially adopted and ratified. From that moment on, the pandemia agreement is a legally binding document.
1) What are the most important points in the treaty?
The first point concerns agreements about the efforts that all individual Member States will have to make to prevent a subsequent pandemic. “All experts expect that the next outbreak will come from the animal world,” says Ellen ‘t Hoen. She is a lawyer and expert in the field of intellectual property law and drug policy and was present in many of the negotiations, from an advisory role. “In this Convention, Member States acknowledge what science has been saying for a long time: we cannot prevent a pandemic if we do not deal with animals better now and the climate. The Member States express the willingness to invest in all kinds of measures in that preventive angle.”
The second important point deals with the question of how vaccines can be fairly distributed in a next pandemic. Relatively poorer countries must soon be able to make vaccines themselves. This is only possible if enough factories are built for this and if pharmacists are prepared to share the intellectual property, knowledge and expertise of making their vaccines. A sensitive issue, and something that hardly happened during the Coronapandemie.
“With this Convention, countries have agreed that they will take measures to allow pharmaceutical things to share technology, knowledge and skills with developing countries with production capacity,” says’ t Hoen. “If they do not do that voluntarily, countries can now also act for a mandatory way. That is a big step forward.”
2) What were the hot issues during the negotiations?
For the global south, the prevention element creates a lot of extra obligations, with all associated financial consequences. “And that in a time when richer countries are recovering their development funds,” said ‘t Hoen.
The discussion about the so-called ‘tech transfer’ of vaccines held the negotiations hostage to the last day, in particular from the heavily distributed Europe. Germany and Switzerland, two countries with a large pharmaceutical industry, have fought up to the all hours to keep such a transfer of intellectual property ‘voluntary’. The negotiations even seemed to clap on that word.
“Ultimately, it was countries such as Brazil, China and India who saved these negotiations,” says Remco van de Pas. As an external researcher Global Governance and Public Health Vebonden at the Clingendael Institute. “These countries build the bridge between the global north and south. They understand the annoyance of always sitting in the second rank and being drained with money instead of structural agreements. But they now also have the capacities to understand what the arguments of European countries are.”
3) How binding is the treaty?
Once the text is through the World Health Meeting, Member States will ratify the Convention and the document is legally binding. But as with more international dilution, such as the Climate Agreement, there are no consequences if the agreements are not complied with.
“The proof of the pudding is in the eating”, Says Van de Pas.” This treaty is a normative instrument, which explains how countries can work together. But it will soon be up to the Member States to actually implement the measures that are necessary, and a price tag depends on that. ”
As with climate policy, according to him, the question remains: do we now want to invest in a threat that is not yet tangible – and that also means investing in, for example, production capacity, Búiten Europe – or do we shift it again for us? And once it comes to a pandemic, do governments actually put pressure on their vaccine developers, or do they opt for their own economic interest?
4) The United States does not participate in the treaty, on the day of Trumps inauguration the country left the negotiations. What does that mean for the weight of the document?
“We can’t make it more beautiful than it is, the absence of the US beats a gaping hole in this treaty,” said health law expert Lawrence Gostin of Georgetown University in Nature. “But the world did not collapse due to Trump’s attack on global health. We just came together.”
Those involved see this treaty mainly as a symbolic step, a sign that there is still a need for the bundling of the worldwide forces, at a time when the ‘Elke-by-Zich’ seems to be highlighted. “Three years is incredibly shortly before negotiations on such an essential and difficult subject,” says’ t Hoen, who, together with many other experts, acknowledges that the agreements in the Convention go a lot less far than was intended in the first version. “But that the 191 countries came out together, and want to come out of, that is not a small beer. It is a victory for multilateralism.”