World leaders need to finalise the Pandemic Agreement by applying political will at the “highest level”, a spirit of equity and a sense of urgency.

This is the call made by World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in an open letter published on Monday ahead of the G7 summit in France.

Talks on the outstanding annex to the Pandemic Agreement, on a pathogen access and benefit sharing (PABS) system, have deadlocked, with negotiations due to resume between 6 and 17 July.

Reminding leaders that around 20 million people died during the COVID-19 pandemic, the letter notes: “To respond to future pandemics in time, countries must be able to quickly identify pathogens with pandemic potential and share their genetic information and material so scientists can develop tools: the tests, the treatments, the vaccines that decide who lives and who does not. 

“The system that makes this possible, fairly and on equal footing, is the PABS annex. It is the last piece of the puzzle, not only for the Pandemic Agreement but for everything WHO and member states have built from the hard lessons of COVID-19. Until it is finished, the agreement cannot enter into force. The promise stays unkept.”

The deadlock is mainly between developed countries, led by Europe and Japan, and developing countries.

“The hardest questions, including how the benefits of shared pathogens are defined and shared, how the system is governed, and how equity is guaranteed on equal footing, are difficult for a reason,” the letter notes. 

“They are the very questions that went unanswered last time, while people who could have been protected were not. The world is wrestling with them now precisely because they matter so much.”

Three steps forward

Tedros and Lula da Silva propose three urgent steps forward:

First, the clear signal that “only a head of government can give: that finishing this annex is a national priority”.

“Second, a spirit of equity. The PABS system rests on a simple, fair bargain: those who share dangerous pathogens quickly must be able to trust that the vaccines and treatments born from that sharing will reach their own people too.” 

Third, a sense of urgency – particularly as scientists predict a close to one-in-four chance of another pandemic within the coming decade.

The letter notes that a PABS system is not “charity”, but will enable pathogens with pandemic potential to be identified and addressed at their source. It will establish a system for countries to speedily identify and share genetic information of these pathogens,  and get swift access to tests, treatments and vaccines to address these.

“Today, the rules for accessing a pathogen and sharing what flows from it are improvised case by case, often mid-crisis. PABS replaces that with a single framework known in advance, stable rules that let laboratories and partners across the world move at the speed an outbreak demands,” the letter notes.

It also reassures leaders that neither the Pandemic Agreement nor the PABS annex will undermine national sovereignty.

“Nothing in the Agreement gives WHO any authority to direct or alter a country’s laws or policies, or to require measures such as lockdowns, travel restrictions or vaccination mandates.

“Those decisions remain with sovereign states. So we ask you, concretely, to instruct your negotiators to come to the July session ready to conclude, and to give them the flexibility to close the remaining gaps and finalise the annex in this round.”