With no agreement in sight, World Health Organization (WHO) member states curtailed talks on the Pandemic Agreement annex five hours earlier than scheduled on Saturday night, resolving to meet again within a month for a further five days of negotiations.

Member states will reconvene between 27 April and 1 May to negotiate further on the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) annex, with the hope of tabling the annex at the World Health Assembly (WHA) in May.

The PABS annex is intended to ensure, on equal footing, the rapid sharing of pathogens with pandemic potential and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from their use, including vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics.

Addressing the tired delegates of the Intergovernmental Working Group (IGWG) after six days of intense talks, WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that their efforts had not been wasted. 

“At the same time, we must be candid,” said Tedros. “Despite best efforts, differences remain on key issues. These are not trivial matters. They go to the heart of equity, access, sovereignty and global solidarity. It’s therefore understandable that more time is needed to bridge these gaps in a meaningful and durable way.”

Tedros expressed support for IGWG’s decision to resume negotiations in about four weeks. 

“This pause is not a setback. It’s an opportunity. It allows us to reflect, to consult further with our capitals, and to return with renewed clarity and flexibility, not to keep negotiating indefinitely, but to continue and to close the deal.”

However, tension was palpable at the start of the sixth – and supposedly final – round of talks last Monday when the African region rejected the Bureau’s draft of the PABS Annex.

Leading Africa’s position, South Africa and Namibia proposed that the draft text circulated by the IGWG Bureau on 9 March should be disregarded in favour of the on-screen text considered at the end of the fifth IGWG meeting on 14 February.

African regional ambassadors had resolved to stick to this text as they had not had time to consult their capitals on the new draft, Namibia reported.

After some tension during the closed session, member states accepted this position.

The message from one African country after another was that they would not allow a repeat of the inequity seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, and would not compromise on certain key issues. These include that the countries sharing pathogens need guaranteed benefits, and that the PABS annex needs “legal certainty”, including contracts for commercial users of pathogen information.

Burkina Faso, speaking for the WHO Africa and Egypt, Sudan, Libya and Somalia, noted that registration should be mandatory for all users of the PABS system, benefit-sharing obligations should be clearer, and there should be more capcity-building –including technology transfer – for developing countries.