Final talks on the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS) system, the last outstanding piece of the Pandemic Agreement, are being held in Geneva this week.

The Pandemic Agreement, being negotiated in Geneva, emerged to address the unacceptable inequities that defined the COVID-19 global health disaster. During this pandemic, delayed and inequitable access to vaccines may have cost more than one million lives, the majority of which could have been averted through earlier vaccine sharing with lower-income countries.

While initially guided by noble objectives, to ensure universal and equitable access to build a more resilient and equitable global health architecture, the EU’s negotiating position has hardly reflected these commitments to date. At the center of the remaining political disputes within the Pandemic Agreement negotiations is the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS) system.

The PABS System is the mechanism through which the Agreement seeks to give concrete meaning to equity. It aims to establish clear obligations on manufacturers and other commercial entities that access and utilize pathogen samples or their genetic sequence for the development of life-saving technology like vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics.

It requires them to commit a portion of such commercialized products as shared benefits through the World Health Organization (WHO), so that the countries whose biological materials made those products possible are not last in line to receive them in the event of a serious health emergency.

The PABS system is predicted to house the largest collection of pathogens with pandemic potential and their sequences. By replacing the burden of negotiating access to these resources on a country-by-country basis with a single multilateral framework, the system is designed to attract researchers and industry into a global pooling arrangement in exchange for accepting equitable benefit-sharing obligations.

Developing countries, which will supply much of the pathogen materials and genomic sequence data for the system, have been calling for the PABS System to include adequate assurances that obligations to share these valuable resources will be matched by fair, equitable, and enforceable benefit-sharing. 

EU can choose better

Despite months of good-faith efforts by many delegations to advance text-based negotiations, the European bloc has been resistant to common-sense proposals to operationalize equity and ensure that the commitments set forth in Article 12 of the Pandemic Agreement can be implemented on an equal footing. 

With time now running short, pressure has been mounting on developing countries to accept a stripped-down annex that is devoid of adequate benefit-sharing provisions and legal guarantees. As was the case in May 2025, the WHO – namely the Director General’s (DG) Office and Secretariat – has reportedly been applying pressure on developing countries to accept a deal while bearing the full burden of making multilateralism succeed at any cost, even at the expense of their own negotiating priorities.

Should a deal on the PABS annex not be reached, it should be clear to all that it is because the European bloc has chosen to act in opposition to basic health equity provisions rather than align its negotiating stance with its (now empty) rhetoric that “no one is safe until everyone is safe.” The bloc’s credibility, however, is not yet beyond recovery.

Mandatory benefit-sharing 

The PABS System rests on two interconnected pillars: the rapid and timely sharing of PABS materials and sequence information, and, on an equal footing, the rapid, timely, fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the sharing or utilization of the PABS materials and sequence information for public health purposes, especially vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics (VTDs). 

While minimal percentages have been guaranteed in the text of the agreement with respect to pandemic emergencies, the 9 March Bureau’s text appears to abandon the critical minimum percentage of VTD supplies to prevent or respond to Public Health Emergencies of International Concern (PHEICS). The text instead relies on undefined “options”, which may be left to be determined by WHO and pharmaceutical manufacturers through bilateral negotiations. 

Deferring critical benefit-sharing negotiations to a bilateral process would represent a significant tactical loss for developing countries, as it is predicted to increase the leverage of commercial entities while stripping provider countries of bargaining power and legal certainty. 

Earlier draft proposals by developing countries tabled their preference for more concrete and standardized benefit-sharing obligations during PHEICs – proposals that the Bureau’s clean text has since removed.

Departure from existing practice

This approach also marks a significant departure from existing practice in access and benefit sharing. Under the Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Framework, for example, standardized material transfer agreements with defined benefit-sharing options have been applied to manufacturers accessing PIP biological materials for fifteen years. 

Moreover, the PABS Annex creates obligations on states to share pathogen materials and sequence information, but manufacturers, commercial users, laboratories, and databases are not signatories to the treaty – and the Annex cannot bind them. The only mechanism to do so is through contracts. 

During the Annex negotiations, many countries have stressed the need to agree on clear, binding terms for both participating manufacturers and non-commercial users. But now that time is running out, countries are being rushed into glossing over important contract term discussions that should be settled before the Agreement is adopted.

Even if full standard contracts cannot be finalized before May 2026, the Annex should, at a minimum, contain all essential elements that must govern access, utilization, benefit-sharing, intellectual property, onward transfer, dispute resolution, and consequences for non-compliance in these contracts.

If obligations to share pathogen materials and sequence information are mandatory and enforceable on states, while benefit-sharing commitments for industry remain ill-defined or optional, and subject to bilateral negotiation, the PABS system no longer operates on the “equal footing” required by Article 12.

Such a system cannot provide legal certainty that critical, life-saving access to vaccines, diagnostics, or therapeutics will reach vulnerable populations in developing countries when they are needed most. This risks condemning developing countries, once again, to the back of the queue – the very inequity the Pandemic Agreement was negotiated to correct.

European nations still have the opportunity to demonstrate that their commitment to equity is more than rhetoric by supporting a transparent, accountable, and enforceable system that ensures that benefit-sharing obligations are as enforceable as the duty to share pathogen samples and genetic sequence information.

No user registration, no accountability

Developing countries have proposed that WHO-recognized sequence databases be required to implement user registration, identity verification, and data-access agreements, and that they enter into binding contractual relationships with WHO, rather than merely agreeing to non-binding terms and conditions. Without the identification and registration of users accessing PABS Sequence Information, there is no practical mechanism to promote transparency and accountability. 

In the negotiations, many European countries have resisted these conditions, arguing they would impede open science or render the system inoperable.

This reasoning, however, is not supported by evidence. As Campos and Sylvester explain in a recent analysis, many widely used genomic repositories already require user registration, identity verification, and data-access agreements – all the while serving tens of thousands of researchers across nearly every country, all of whom routinely accept terms of use while still conducting time-sensitive, large-scale analyses. The resistance, they note, isn’t technical but political.

Justifications behind such resistance become even more difficult to swallow when one considers the EU’s own internal policies. Within the European Health Data Space, adopted in February of 2025 last year, researchers accessing health data, including pathogen genomic data, must register, specify their purpose, operate under supervision, and remain traceable. The system is sophisticated, enforceable, and deliberately so.

The EU position also favors private entities and externally governed databases over WHO Member States collectively as custodians of critical pathogen data infrastructure, and this carries significant implications for the sovereign control that states exercise over the system.

When pathogen sequence data flows into databases whose governance, access policies, and terms of use are set by host institutions and private funders rather than by member states collectively, the countries that provide the raw material lose meaningful control over their genetic resources and oversight over how their contributions are stored, accessed, or used.

At this late stage of negotiations, European countries would be wise not to lose sight of the forest for the trees. If source countries come to see the PABS system as one in which their resources are extracted while governance and benefits remain elsewhere, the likely result is not greater openness but restricted sharing, bilateral workarounds, and a fragmented framework that fails all.

If any single element can collapse the PABS system, it is anonymous access to PABS sequence information because it facilitates and legitimizes biopiracy through digital means. The EU would therefore do well to withdraw its resistance to user registration, a meaningful step toward restoring goodwill.

Call for equity in the European Bloc

We do not write this as adversaries of European governments. As civil society members, we believe it is important to make EU governments fully conscious of the choices they are making and the implications of the demands they put forward.

We take the EU’s stated values seriously – its commitment to multilateralism, to the Convention on Biological Diversity, to the Pandemic Agreement, and to health emergency preparedness. It is precisely because we take those commitments at face value that we urge the EU to align its negotiating positions with the values that it claims to uphold.

The 23-28 March session is the last scheduled round before the PABS Annex goes to the World Health Assembly. The decisions made at IGWG6 will determine whether the Pandemic Agreement delivers on its promise of equity or institutionalizes the very asymmetries it was designed to correct

The EU has the standing and the influence to shift the trajectory of these negotiations—by withdrawing its resistance to standard benefit-sharing provisions, enforceable contracts, and user registration. We urge it to do so.

Guilherme Faviero is a Director at the AHF Global Public Health Institute and represents AHF Brasil, a relevant civil society stakeholder in the WHO Pandemic Agreement and PABS Annex negotiations.

Nithin Ramakrishnan is a Senior Researcher at Third World Network (TWN), and represents TWN—a relevant civil society stakeholder in the WHO Pandemic Agreement and PABS Annex negotiations. The views are personal. 

Image Credits: Alexandre Lalleman/ Upslash, Mstyslav Chernov/ Wikimedia Commons, Carl Campbell/ Unsplash, International Monetary Fund/Ernesto Benavides, Marco Verch.