The Covid-19 pandemic revealed that, in a global health emergency, all the aspirational rhetoric about international cooperation didn’t mean much. Once groundbreaking Covid-19 vaccines became available a year into the pandemic, rich countries looked out for themselves and poorer countries were largely left behind.
That brought recriminations, but also a pledge from the world’s nations to learn from those mistakes and create a better playbook for when a future pathogen inevitably threatens the world. So at the end of 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the global community would negotiate a pandemic treaty to set the rules for international cooperation in future public health crises. Those efforts were supposed to reach a triumphant conclusion this May, at the World Health Assembly in Geneva, where the final product of treaty negotiations would be reviewed and ratified by the world’s nations.
But the last few months of negotiations have instead been tumultuous. The same divisions between rich and poor countries that emerged during Covid are now threatening to derail what was meant to be a landmark achievement in protecting the world from catastrophic pandemics.
The fundamental problem is that, much as they were in the thick of the pandemic, wealthy nations remain largely allied with Big Pharma against the Global South’s interests.
The stalemate over sharing information about emerging diseases
One major sticking point in the pandemic treaty is about coming to an agreement on sharing information about dangerous new pathogens — a key component of keeping the world safe from future pandemics.
Africa in particular is the source of many emerging diseases that could pose a risk to humans. Under the system being contemplated in the pandemic treaty talks, once a potentially dangerous virus is identified, developing countries would share access to viral samples with developed countries, home to the bulk of the world’s biopharmaceutical…
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