By JAMEY KEATEN and MARIA CHENG
GENEVA (AP) — The development of a global treaty to fight pandemics like COVID-19 will have to wait. After more than two years of negotiations, rich and poor countries have failed—for now—in their attempt to come up with a plan for how they could jointly respond to the next pandemic.
After the COVID-19 pandemic triggered once-unthinkable lockdowns, disrupted economies and killed millions of people, leaders at the World Health Organization and around the world pledged to do better going forward. In 2021, member countries asked the UN health agency to oversee negotiations to determine how the world could better share scarce resources and prevent future viruses from spreading across the planet.
Roland Driece, co-chair of the WHO negotiating commission for the agreement, acknowledged on Friday that countries had not been able to present a draft. The WHO hoped that the annual meeting of health ministers, which begins Monday in Geneva, would reach an agreement on the final draft of the treaty.
“We are not where we expected to be when we started this process,” he said, adding that finalizing an international agreement on how to respond to a pandemic was essential “for the good of humanity.”
Driece said next week’s World Health Assembly would take lessons from their work and chart the way forward, urging participants to make “the right decisions to move this process forward” to one day reach an agreement on pandemics. “because we need it.”
The draft treaty had attempted to address the gap between COVID-19 vaccines in rich countries and those in poorer countries, which WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said was “a catastrophic moral failure.” .
“This is not a failure,” insisted the head of the WHO, referring to the last day of negotiations
“We will try everything — believing that anything is possible — and we will make this happen because the world still needs a pandemic treaty,” he said. “Because many of the challenges that caused a serious impact during COVID-19 still exist.”
The goal of the agreement was to establish guidelines for how the WHO’s 194 member countries could stop future pandemics and better share resources. But experts warned that there are virtually no consequences for countries that do not comply.
___
Cheng reported from London.