Press Release – Deep Divisions Remain And Time Is Running Out To Negotiate A Pandemic Agreement

The ninth meeting of the International Negotiating Body (INB) for a WHO instrument on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response took place between 18th and 28th March 2024 in Geneva, Switzerland.

The usual format for the meeting was followed – the opening and closing sessions were publicly webcast with all other sessions held in private. The publicly available sessions can be watched here.

Plenary Session – 18th March

The Director General of the WHO, Tedros Ghebreyesus, and Co-Chair of the INB, Precious Matsoso, opened the ninth meeting. Both used emotive language to justify the need for a pandemic treaty with Precious referring to herself as a “survivor” of Covid 19 and Tedros referencing the seven (7) million lives lost to Covid 19.

Precious stated, “You can’t chicken out now. You’ve already agreed. So because this is now in a legal text, perhaps what you need to do is to determine which of those elements should be obligatory.”

Tedros pointed out the areas of agreement and ended by saying, “We would have a much bigger problem if you did not agree on the fundamental objectives of the agreement. But you do now you need to agree on how to achieve these objectives. I have every confidence that you can and will.”

Precious handed back to her co-chair of the INB, Roland Driece, to adopt the Agenda and the Programme of Work.

What followed was no different to previous INB meetings – Member States and Relevant Stakeholders (read “vested interests”) were given the opportunity to comment on the latest draft of the pandemic treaty known as the “revised draft of the negotiating text” (which had been shared previously with the delegation) and can be found here.

As at previous INB meetings, equity remained a significant concern with many developing countries making the point that the language, with respect to equity, is merely aspirational. There continues to be a lack of consensus regarding process with developing countries unsupportive of parallel sessions (on the basis that smaller delegations cannot manage simultaneous sessions) whilst developed countries are supportive of the same seeing them as a necessity if agreement is to be reached within the, now, very tight timeframe. Many of the developing countries expressed their support for the latest draft as a “good start” for text based negotiations however, this positivity was not shared by several of the developed countries. Switzerland, for example, “does not accept the text in its current state”.

What was glaringly evident is the deep divisions between developed and developing countries and with little time left to negotiate ahead of the 77th World Health Assembly (WHA) convening from 27th May to 1st June 2024, the lack of consensus must be of concern.

A sample of Member State positions can be seen below.

India on behalf of the South East Asia region stated “to operationalise equity, we need to clearly delineate obligations with responsibilities on various parties, including mentioning developed countries vis a vis developing countries, which is missing in the current negotiating text.”

Ethiopia on behalf of the forty-seven (47) African nations and Egypt stated that the most recent text is a basis for negotiation only and that a shift in the status quo is still required.

South African aligned with Ethiopia and Bangladesh felt that equity still needs to be “operationalised” and that the “status quo is unsustainable and it should neither be preserved nor perpetuated…”.

Bangladesh on behalf of the thirty-one (31) countries known as the “Equity Group” called for an action orientated agreement and addressed the lack of “legal certainty”.

USA maintained that the latest draft represents a step backwards in many areas and stated, “At this late stage, it is not productive to reintroduce challenging concepts such as CBDR (common but differentiated responsibility), intellectual property waivers and new funding vehicles that do not have a chance of achieving consensus”. The USA went on to say: “We have stated very clearly, on multiple occasions, that these are red lines” and, “We have run out of time to be revisiting provisions that are not implementable, not feasible or contrary to national law”.

The European Union commented on the “significant dilution” of pandemic prevention and preparedness and added that the text “could have been an opportunity to find an agreement in key areas such as technology transfer and intellectual property, financing, and PABS (pathogen access and benefit sharing) at the time where stakeholders have never been more ready to make a decisive contribution to benefit sharing” (i.e. public private partnership!).

Germany commented that the revised text “still contains elements that have been clearly identified as non-consensual”.

The United Kingdom said “…first, for us, the text before us is a step backwards. Progress that we made in sub-groups has been lost. The tech transfer and PABS provisions are far from consensus and they’re unworkable as stakeholders have made clear while the text on prevention, so important for the objectives of this accord, is simply too weak. Second, there is, in our view, no credible plan in front of us to conclude this negotiation. We simply cannot negotiate thirty-one pages of dense legal text in plenary. We don’t see why we have disbanded the sub-groups and we strongly recommend re-establishing structured informal groups to work together on streamlining the text before us”.

After “interventions” from the Member States, the floor was opened up to the “Relevant Stakeholders”.

A small sample of comments from Relevant Stakeholders can be seen below. Many felt equity had been diluted and was aspirational rather than operationalised.

Gavi maintained its position re-stating “Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, would like to make the following recommendations to Member States (1) reinstate immunisation as an essential disease prevention tool preventing outbreaks before they become pandemics and strengthening health systems between pandemics and particularly surveillance and supply chains; (2) protect the 20% pandemic products allocations for lower income countries as the bare minimum percentage of benefit sharing as well as the provisions supporting those donations in future pandemics; …(4) ensure that the governance attached to the various functions of the pandemic agreement is country driven with a clearly defined role for specialised agencies, civil society and the private sector”. (More stakeholder capitalism anyone?)

The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA) felt, like some Member States, that the revised text was a “step backwards”.

The open session ended and moved into “closed” drafting sessions i.e. kept secret from the people.

Plenary Session 28th March

Agreement was not reached and therefore INB9 to be resumed at the end of April 2024.

The INB considered the draft report of the meeting. The same was published on 15th April 2024 and can be read here

The INB requested the Bureau, with the help of the Secretariat, to produce a proposed draft of the WHO Pandemic Agreement to be negotiated, by the INB, at the resumed session of INB9. This document was published on [17th April 2024] and can be read here.

The ninth session of the INB will reconvene 29th April 2024..

Next steps