Controversial WHO Negotiations Spill into Public View

By Stefano Gennarini, J.D. | February 29, 2024

Logo of the World Health Organization (WHO)

NEW YORK, March 1 (C-Fam) The secret negotiations of a new WHO pandemic treaty spilled over into an open procedural debate last month, exposing wide disagreements about the scope of the pandemic treaty, how it should be implemented, and how it will be financed.

The brief moment of transparency revealed a central point of disagreement, the concept of “Equity Implementation” – a priority for the Biden administration and the European union from the outset of the negotiations last year.

Developing countries like to think the term “equity” means that wealthy countries will grant equal access to health resources and vaccines and other medicines during pandemics. But Western countries consider the term to refer to controversial social issues like abortion and homosexual/trans issues in their own foreign policy, as for example in the recently published U.S. State Department Equity Action Plan.

Wide gaps remain between the overall expectations of wealthy Western governments and the hopes of the Global South for the two separate agreements about pandemic preparedness that are concurrently being negotiated, a new pandemic treaty on the one hand and updates to the 2005 WHO international health regulations on the other.

Cash-strapped developing countries hope the two agreements will provide greater access to financing for healthcare, greater access to intellectual property for medicines and vaccines, and more financial assistance from wealthy donor governments.

On the other hand, powerful Western governments want to expand the power and role of the World Health Organization to guide how all countries prepare for future pandemics. This means giving Western governments a greater say in how countries run their health systems internally, including by establishing financing mechanisms that give the WHO leverage on countries’ internal policies, and through mechanisms to promote controversial social policies like abortion and homosexual/trans issues.

This divergence in expectations sets up the possibility that wealthy Western countries will make financing for the implementation of the pandemic conditional on their own interpretation of “equity.”

The topic was so controversial that a special extra session of negotiations was scheduled on March 8 to discuss this topic alone. The ongoing disagreement could prove fatal for reaching the pandemic agreement’s May deadline on time.

Perhaps most worryingly, after more than two years of discussion, countries have yet to define “pandemic” for purpose of the binding treaty and regulations.

Leading countries of the Global South, including India, China, Pakistan, and the entire African Group asked that there be clear legal definition of what constitutes both a “pandemic” and a “pandemic emergency.” The latter term is understood as referring to the brief periods in time leading up to a pandemic where health alerts and concerted action may derail a full-scale pandemic. A “pandemic”, on the other hand, can be a much longer period.

Such definitions, they argued are necessary to define the obligations and responsibilities of countries and the WHO at any given time, including how the world can go back to normal after a pandemic emergency.

The Biden administration, on the other hand, seemed less concerned with creating a definition of pandemic, as with granting the Director-General of the World Health Organization power to declare a pandemic emergency and triggering any resultant emergency powers and obligations.

“It’s enough that the Director-General who declares a pandemic emergency based on a set of criteria,” said U.S. Ambassador Pamela K. Hamamoto. “We are not yet convinced that there also needs to be a separate definition of pandemic.”

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