A FINAL round of talks to finalise an international pandemic treaty was set to end on Friday.
The ninth and final round of talks comes as the World Health Health Organisation and national leaders aimed to do better after the Covid pandemic killed millions and upended economies.
But, years later, countries are still struggling to agree on a plan to respond to the next global outbreak.
In 2021 the United Nations agency was tasked by member countries to oversee talks for a pandemic agreement.
Envoys have been working to prepare a draft, ahead of a self-imposed deadline later this month, to enable ratification of the accord at World Health Organisation’s annual meeting. But deep divisions could still derail an agreement.
United States Republican senators last week urged President Joe Biden not to sign off the pact because it focused on issues like “shredding intellectual property rights” and “supercharging the WHO.”
The British government is reportedly set to oppose the treaty.
Britain’s Department of Health said it would only agree to an accord if it was “firmly in the UK national interest and respects national sovereignty.”
Many developing countries say it is unfair that they might be expected to provide virus samples to help develop vaccines and treatments, but then be unable to afford them.
Campaigners from Global Justice Now said: “We can’t afford to repeat the same mistakes again.”
GJN added that rich nations “must support global South nations in scaling up vaccine production capacity, like South Africa’s mRNA vaccine hub which makes lifesaving medicines affordable and accessible.”
WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom said the gap between Covid-19 vaccines in rich and poorer countries amounted to “a catastrophic moral failure.”
But there appears to be no mechanism within WHO to ensure countries comply with the treaty.
Roland Driece, co-chair of WHO’s negotiating board for the agreement, said the pandemic treaty “is not about anyone telling the government of a country what it can do and what it cannot do.”
Suerie Moon, co-director of the Global Health Centre at Geneva’s Graduate Institute, said it was critical to determine the expected role of WHO during a pandemic and how outbreaks might be stopped before spreading globally.
Yuanqiong Hu, senior policy adviser at Doctors without Borders, said the differences of the next pandemic are unclear, but hoped that focusing attention on some of the glaring errors that emerged in Covid-19 might help.
“We will mostly have to rely on countries to do better,” she said. “That is worrisome.”
