Mistrust undermined the pandemic agreement talks – but, ironically, the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) galvanised member states to reach agreement, according to Ambassador Anne-Claire Amprou, co-chair of the talks.

“There was a lack of trust. That means that when member states wanted to make a proposal, sometimes it created suspicion – not because of the content but because of the delegation that put the proposal on the table, and that was not always very easy to navigate,” Amprou told a meeting in Geneva on Tuesday.

But after the US withdrew from the WHO on 20 January,  “we could feel that member states wanted to preserve the WHO, to preserve multilateralism, and I think that it helped to have a sense of compromise at the end,” she said.

The meeting, convened by the Geneva Graduate Institute’s Global Health Centre, the Pandemic Action Network (PAN) and the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB), reflected both on the process of reaching on the agreement and on the road ahead.

Ambassador Umej Bhatia of Singapore credited Amprou with bringing trust to the negotiations when she became co-chair in July 2024, replacing Roland Driece of the Netherlands.

“Building trust requires folks to say: ‘Look, I’m going to come here and I’m going to put all the ego to the side and work on something important for humanity,” he said, crediting the women leaders in the talks for being particularly helpful. 

Bhatia also thanked “the president of a very big power” for pushing delegates over the line.

The pandemic agreement is the “first major agreement” where the US is absent and that “spurred” member states to ensure that they championed and protected multilateralism, he added.

While the agreement is symbolically important for multilateralism, it is also important because it is “a global acknowledgement of the importance of equity and inclusivity” – although that depends on getting PABS  [the annex on a Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing system] done,” Bhatia stressed.

Negotiations on how a PABS system will work still has to be negotiated, and this is expected to be concluded by next year’s World Health Assembly (WHA).

COVID broke trust

Juliana Tenorio Quintero, Minister Plenipotentiary of Colombia’s Mission in Geneva, ascribed the lack of trust between member states to what happened during COVID-19, when developing countries could not get timely access to medical countermeasures.

She added that the pandemic agreement is “huge” – “like five agreements in one”. Talks were hard because there was a lack of expertise in crafting global health law treaties, member states were involved in the parallel process of negotiating the Intergovernmental Health Regulations (IHR), were under pressure from non-state actors – as well as the lack of trust and geopolitical context.

“Right at the end of the two years, we discovered that informal negotiations are the key to unlock negotiations,” said Quintero.

She also said that the personal commitment of delegates needs to continue to complete the next phase: “We became a family after many days and nights together – perhaps sometimes a dysfunctional family, as one colleague told me – but in any case, a family committed to deliver an instrument that served mankind.”

Three hundred days until deadline

WHO legal officer Steven Solomon said that the PABS annex had to be completed by 17  April 2026 if it was was to be passed by next year’s WHA.

“If you’re counting days, that’s 300 days. If you’re counting weeks, that’s 43 weeks and three days,” said Solomon.

An Intergovernmental Working Group (IGWG), which still needs to be set up, will manage the next phase of negotiations.

The South Centre’s Viviana Muñoz-Tellez said the two next steps – negotiating PABS and implementation – would determine whether the agreement enables global collaboration.

Muñoz-Tellez also called for “meaningful spaces for getting the inputs of all sorts of non-state actors” because we know that “industry will definitely be on top of PABS”, but we really need to get other parties to be involved.

Amprou said that the preparatory work for the implementation should start as soon as possible, in parallel to negotiations on the annex, which she thought should be a short document.

“I think that this negotiation should be much more technical than political. We know the political positions of different member states,” said Amprou.

Bhatia said that the PABS talks involved both national and hard commercial interests, which made reaching agreement very difficult.

He urged the PABS annex to emphasize “scientific collaboration”, describing it as under threat in a world where there’s a lot of anti-science sentiment.

Quintero said that the agreement’s technology transfer “lacks ambition”, and also called for an implementation committee. 

Closing the discussion, Norwegian Ambassador Angell-Hansen, said that the nationalisation of production benefits, in particular vaccines, posed a threat to the legal certainty of the agreement and it is “very important to have a maximum water-tight legal text on this”.

During the COVID pandemic, India prohibited the export of vaccines which were due to have been supplied to the global vaccine platform, Gavi, for global distribution.

“It is important that the PABS system works in a simple, transparent and fair manner,” said Angell-Hanson, who is a GPMB board member. 

“Here, I would like to make a special reference to the position paper that industry from both north and south jointly developed, and I would encourage them to develop this paper further and in very concrete ways.”

Image Credits: Thiru Balasubramaniam.