WHO pandemic treaty still stalled

WHO member states left the World Health Assembly this week without the final annex needed to activate the pandemic agreement they adopted a year ago. The World Health Organization said on May 21 that countries had decided to continue drafting and negotiating the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing, or PABS, annex under the Intergovernmental Working Group on the WHO Pandemic Agreement. The unresolved annex matters because the 2025 agreement cannot open for signature until that text is adopted by the Health Assembly. The dispute has kept the accord in a holding pattern even as delegates in Geneva spent the week discussing pandemic prevention, preparedness and response. ### Why is a treaty adopted in 2025 still not in force? The World Health Assembly adopted the WHO Pandemic Agreement on May 20, 2025, after years of negotiations that followed the COVID-19 pandemic. But the resolution adopted with it said the agreement would open for signature only after the Health Assembly adopts the annex described in Article 12. Article 12 covers the PABS system, which is meant to govern how pathogens, sequence information and resulting benefits are shared in a future health emergency. (who.int) Article 31 is the bottleneck. The text of the agreement says signature will come only after the Article 12 annex is adopted, on dates to be determined by the Health Assembly. That means the agreement has been formally adopted but is not yet at the stage where countries can sign and move toward ratification. ### What exactly are countries still fighting over? (who.int) The PABS annex is the part of the deal that links access to pathogens and genetic sequence data with access to the products developed from them. A WHO draft text says the system is meant to provide "rapid and timely" sharing of materials and sequence information and, on an equal footing, "fair and equitable" sharing of benefits arising from their use. Those benefits include vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics and other public-health tools. (apps.who.int) The political dispute is over how binding those benefits should be and what countries and manufacturers would owe in return for access to samples and data. Lower-income countries have long argued that they should not be expected to share pathogens quickly if wealthier countries and pharmaceutical companies can then monopolize the resulting vaccines, tests and treatments. WHO has described the annex as a priority task for the Intergovernmental Working Group since the 2025 adoption. (apps.who.int) ### What did WHO say in Geneva this week? The WHO's daily update for May 21 said the World Health Assembly decided to continue the drafting and negotiation of the PABS annex under the Intergovernmental Working Group. The update said the group, acting under Article 12 of the agreement, would continue to prioritize that work. In a separate WHO page on the pandemic agreement, the agency described the accord as the world's first pandemic agreement but made clear that the PABS annex remains part of the implementation process. (who.int) The Seventy-ninth World Health Assembly ran in Geneva from May 18 to May 23, 2026. WHO's media resources page listed daily updates from the meeting, including the May 21 note that confirmed the extension of negotiations. ### What has happened since the agreement was adopted? WHO member states began discussing the proposed PABS annex text in November 2025 at the third meeting of the Intergovernmental Working Group. (who.int) WHO said at the time that this was the first discussion of the draft annex and called it "a key part" of the agreement adopted earlier that year. The agency said in September 2025 that member states were meeting to further develop the PABS system, which it described as a critical annex. (who.int) WHO's governance pages show that the Intergovernmental Working Group was created specifically to draft and negotiate the annex as a priority and to submit the outcome to the 2026 World Health Assembly. That submission happened, but the assembly did not finalize the annex this week. ### What happens next? (who.int) The Intergovernmental Working Group will continue negotiations on the PABS annex after the close of WHA79 in Geneva, according to WHO's May 21 update. The next formal step is adoption of that annex by the World Health Assembly, because only then can the pandemic agreement open for signature under Article 31. (who.int 1) (who.int 2)