WHO Assembly approves Pandemic Agreement

There have been many questions about how well or how badly the World Health Organisation (WHO) had responded to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020-2021 even as it spread like wildfire from China’s Wuhan first to Italy and Iran, and then spread to other countries in Europe and from there to the United States and other countries in North and South America.

While the economically advanced countries and the big global pharmaceutical companies located in these countries were able to get a breakthrough Covid vaccine, and speedily made available to people at large, most of the poor countries were left totally vulnerable and without the financial means to access the vaccines. There was also the issue that the governments of advanced economies refused to share the vaccines until their own needs were met. So, the big pharma firms could not see their vaccine where they wanted to.

The WHO had however tried to organise relief, and countries like India, UAE and others tried to share the vaccines. Learning from the difficulties it had faced as a world organisation and responsible to the people of all countries, especially the poorer ones in places like Africa, during a global medical emergency of the Covid kind, WHO had been deliberating on the issue of how to help the most vulnerable who are not in a position to access the medicines and the finances to cope with the disaster.

So, the WHO has come up with a plan to enable cooperation among member-countries and the big pharma companies. It has been called the Pandemic Agreement and the WHO Assembly had passed the agreement on Monday. It starts with the caveat that the agreement will not in any way be imposed on a country where the national laws will prevail. This is to acknowledge the principle of national sovereignty of each of the member-countries.

Dr. Teodora Herbosa, Secretary of the Philippines Department of Health and present president of the WHO Assembly, said, “Now that the Agreement has been brought to life, we must all act with the same urgency to implement its critical elements, including systems to ensure equitable access to life-saving pandemic-related health products.” The Agreement lays stress on ways and means to closer global cooperation in the wake of a pandemic in the future. Herbosa says that relevant lessons from Covid-19 have been drawn in drawing up plans for a future emergency.

The Agreement as it stands now is incomplete. The annex, called the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing System (PABS), needs to be negotiated by the Intergovernmental Working Group (IGWG), and it would need to be passed in the WHO Assembly next year. The Agreement with the PABS annex will then need to be ratified by each of the 138 countries. The member-countries have asked the IGWG to set up a Coordination Financial Mechanism for pandemic prevention, preparedness and response, and the Global Supply Chain and Logistics Network (GSCL) which will help bring down the barriers and facilitate access to pandemic-related life-saving drugs.

The point of cheer is that all members of WHO had agreed the need to stand with each other, cooperate with each other at the time of a global emergency like the Covid. The IGWG now has to work out the mechanisms of making the agreement, which includes PABS. During Covid, WHO was only able o rustle up help in an ad hoc fashion, and it had to depend on the generosity of the member-countries. The Pandemic Agreement formally binds all the member-countries to come to the aid of WHO, which will in turn see to it that help reaches the poor and vulnerable countries.