As countries continue negotiating the unfinished WHO Pandemic Agreement, one of the original accord’s architects warns that delays could put the process itself at risk.

“I think it’s quite risky to have a too-long negotiation because that means that we will lose diplomats and public health experts who were involved at the very beginning,” said Anne-Claire Amprou, French Ambassador for Global Health and former co-chair of the intergovernmental negotiations that delivered the agreement.

Speaking on a recent episode of Global Health Matters, Amprou joined Lia Tadesse Gebremedhin, former Ethiopian Minister of Health, to take listeners behind the scenes of the three-year negotiations that culminated in the agreement’s adoption in May 2025.

Their conversation comes as countries are still trying to complete the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) annex, intended to establish a system for sharing pathogens with pandemic potential while ensuring equitable access to resulting vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics.

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Amprou said the original negotiations repeatedly collided with geopolitical tensions, including wars and the US withdrawal from WHO, making it essential to bring countries back to their shared public health objective.

“Just to remember why we were in the room together, even at 4 a.m., 5 a.m., that was key in the determination to finalise the negotiation and to go beyond geopolitical tensions and political divergences,” she said.

For Tadesse, the negotiations also demonstrated how smaller countries could build influence despite arriving with far fewer negotiators. While some countries had delegations of 20 to 25 experts, she said African countries might have only one or two, forcing them to combine expertise and coordinate their positions.

“The approach was really to work as a group. So the Africa group really worked well together,” Tadesse said.

That cooperation ultimately helped 47 countries build a common voice, while Amprou said compromise was unavoidable if the agreement was going to survive.

“It’s not perfect, but it’s better to have something which is maybe less ambitious than the initial wish than nothing,” she said. “Because after that, we can build on that.”

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Image Credits: Global Health Matters Podcast.