WHO fails pandemic prevention agreement and resumes negotiations in April

The member countries of the World Health Organization (WHO) were unable to reach an agreement to better prepare the world for a future pandemic, and negotiations should resume in April, according to the France-Presse news agency this Friday.

“We are not far from reaching an agreement”, said the director general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, at the end of the negotiations at the organization’s headquarters in Geneva, highlighting: “an agreement is an instrument that saves lives and not just a piece of paper”.

The 194 member countries of the WHO decided to draft a binding text to avoid repeating the deadly and costly mistakes made during the catastrophic management of the Covid-19 pandemic, which made it clear to what extent the world was ill-prepared to deal with a health crisis.

The ninth and final round of negotiations began on March 18 and ended on Thursday without a final text, after two years of negotiations.

Discussions began in February 2022, so that the text could be formally adopted at the next World Health Assembly, on May 27th.

But, with the trauma of the pandemic already fading, there remain major points of contention, with the draft agreement still full of provisional wordings and possible alternatives.

The discussions became even more difficult because WHO members are used to reaching agreements by consensus, finding common ground, a procedure that normally takes many years.

However, the possibility of a deal is not completely dead and countries must decide whether to grant themselves additional days of negotiations, from April 29 to May 10.

The table of the intergovernmental negotiating group, which is leading the talks, will prepare a new draft text by April 18th at the latest, and will try to conclude the discussions by May 5th.

Working groups warned that pressure to reach an agreement could result in a watered-down text that would do little to make the world safer than it was before Covid-19.

Key issues still under discussion include access to emerging pathogens, better epidemic prevention and surveillance, reliable financing and technology transfer to poorer countries.

The nationalism and selfishness of vaccination, the lack of protective equipment, the exposure and exhaustion of health professionals, the donation of almost expired serum stocks by rich countries to poor countries, under the pretext of solidarity, are just some of the many dysfunctions shown in the last pandemic.

In the opinion of experts, China was also too late, in December 2019, to share information about Covid-19.

Already this week, Ghebreyesus warned that without an agreement the world will see “the same inequalities, the same lack of coordination, the same avoidable loss of lives and livelihoods, and the same social, economic and political upheaval”, as happened with covid-19.