Plans for a global agreement on pandemic preparedness are at risk of falling apart amid wrangling and disinformation, according to the head of the World Health Organization, who has warned that future generations “may not forgive us”.
Shocked by the Covid-19 pandemic, the 194 member states of the WHO decided more than two years ago to negotiate an international agreement aimed at ensuring that countries are better equipped to deal with the next health disaster, or avoid it altogether to prevent.
The plan was to seal the deal at the 2024 World Health Assembly, the WHO’s decision-making body, which meets on May 27.
However, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said momentum was being held back by entrenched views and “a flood of fake news, lies and conspiracy theories.”
He warned that if no one was willing to seize the initiative or give up ground, the entire project was in danger of going nowhere.
Tedros told the WHO board of directors in Geneva on Monday: “Time is very short. And there are still a number of outstanding issues that still need to be resolved.”
Failure to reach an agreement would be “a missed opportunity that future generations may not forgive us,” he said.
Tedros said all countries need the capacity to detect and share pathogens that pose a risk, and timely access to tests, treatments and vaccines.
He called for a “strong agreement that will help protect our children and grandchildren from future pandemics.”
Tedros said claims that the deal would cede sovereignty to the WHO or give it the power to impose lockdowns and vaccine mandates were “completely false.”
“We cannot allow this historic agreement, this milestone in global health, to be sabotaged.”
WHO Member States decided in December 2021 to create a new international instrument for pandemic prevention, preparedness and response, aimed at ensuring that the shortcomings that made Covid-19 a global crisis could never recur.
WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan reminded countries how the pandemic “torn apart our social, economic and political systems and became a multi-trillion-dollar problem.”
Amid major geopolitical conflicts, this is “one thing the world agrees on,” he said.
Roland Driece, co-chair of the negotiations, said the project reduced a seven-year process into two years.
He said the agreement must be ambitious, innovative and with clear agreements.
Addressing the disagreements, he said European countries wanted to invest more money in pandemic prevention, while Africa wanted the knowledge and financing to make that work, plus good access to pandemic “countermeasures” such as vaccines and treatments.
He said there were still two two-week sessions left to do an “extreme” amount of work.
Parallel negotiations are also underway on the reform of the International Health Regulations (IHR), which many countries consider to be seriously inadequate.
On this basis, on January 30, 2020, Tedros declared Covid-19 a public health emergency of international concern – the highest alert level available under the regulations.
But it was not until March 2020, when he described the deteriorating situation as a pandemic – a word not in the IHL vocabulary – that the world was jolted into action, and by then the virus was already widespread.
Tedros declared an end to the international emergency in May 2023.
Ashley Bloomfield, the CEO of New Zealand’s Ministry of Health during the pandemic, is co-chairing the IHR negotiations.
Like Tedros, he criticized a “coordinated and sophisticated campaign” of disinformation and disinformation that sought to undermine the process.
He said there were 300 proposed amendments that needed to be plowed through during the talks.