A family walks past a mural promoting vaccination for COVID-19 in Duduza township, east of Johannesburg, South Africa, on June 23, 2021.Themba Hadebe/The Associated Press
A tidal wave of disinformation was among the damaging factors that doomed the world’s two-year effort to negotiate a legally binding treaty on equity and fairness in future pandemics, the head of the World Health Organization says.
Negotiators were unable to reach agreement on the proposed accord before Monday’s self-imposed deadline, throwing the treaty into limbo. There are discussions about a possible extension to allow the talks to continue, but the process is now likely to stretch on for months or years without any assured outcome.
The much-debated global accord is aimed at improving fairness in access to vaccines and other health technologies in future pandemics. An estimated 1.3 million people died from COVID-19 in poorer countries in 2021 and 2022 because they lacked the vaccines that wealthier countries were stockpiling, studies found.
But the pandemic treaty has been dogged by conspiracy theories from far-right activists who claimed, falsely, that it would create a world government with the power to strip away national sovereignty and impose lockdowns on unwilling populations. This, in turn, made it difficult for Western politicians to throw their weight behind the treaty.
“You have operated amid a torrent of mis- and disinformation that was undermining your negotiations,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told global health officials on Monday in Geneva at the opening session of the annual World Health Assembly.
In an example of the rumours swirling around the issue, the Reuters news agency spotted a truck near the site of Monday’s meeting with a sign reading: “NO to the Pandemic Treaty. STOP the UN Power Grab.”
Dr. Tedros said he was optimistic that the assembly will find a way to push ahead with the negotiations. “I know that there remains among you a common will to get this done,” he told the assembly.
“The task before you was immense – technically, legally and politically. You have worked long days and nights. Imagine closing your meetings at 2 a.m., 3 a.m. The record was 4 a.m. If you didn’t have commitment, you wouldn’t do that – 4 a.m., sleepless nights.”
UN Secretary-General António Guterres also appealed to the health assembly to find a solution. “The Pandemic Agreement is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to ensure the global health system can respond more quickly – and equitably – when the next pandemic strikes,” he said in a video message on Monday.
In a formal written report to the assembly, Dr. Tedros concluded flatly that the negotiators “did not reach consensus on the text.” He released the latest draft version of the proposed treaty, colour-coded to show the areas of “initial agreement” and “initial convergence,” and with brackets to show the clauses with “divergent views.”
The 30-page text is riddled with scores of bracketed phrases, showing the large number of objections by various countries.
Canada was among the wealthy countries that argued for vague and flexible language on key elements of the treaty, including mechanisms to allow technology transfer and vaccine-sharing with poorer countries. In some cases, it wanted the word “shall” to be replaced by weaker clauses such as “intends to” or “on voluntary and mutually agreed terms.”
The federal government believes that the transfer of health technology should be a voluntary process, requiring agreement from the technology’s holder, Health Canada spokesperson Mark Johnson told The Globe and Mail.
Analysts said they were disappointed by the failure to reach consensus on the treaty, but they noted that the negotiations had made some achievements.
“Genuine progress was made in some areas, including recognizing the importance of international humanitarian law, and of the particular needs of people in fragile and humanitarian settings,” said Adam Houston, a medical policy adviser at the Canadian office of Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders).
“It would be even more unfortunate if this progress was lost,” Mr. Houston told The Globe. “We hope that negotiations will continue, with a focus on reaching a productive consensus on unresolved issues that yields an effective tool to address future pandemics.”
The issues of global vaccine access and equity were exposed again last week when a South African health group released a stack of COVID-19 vaccine negotiation documents that it had obtained in a court battle. The internal documents showed that Moderna had demanded a price of US$42 per dose from the South African government at the height of the pandemic in 2021 – higher than the prices it charged to wealthy countries – and had also insisted that South Africa must pay the full cost of transporting the vaccines from its European offices, as well as providing a 15-year confidentiality pledge.
As a result of those demands, South Africa had to rely on other vaccine suppliers and never managed to obtain any Moderna vaccines. It took nearly a year for South Africa to get the same level of vaccine access that wealthy countries enjoyed, according to Health Justice Initiative, the group that obtained the documents.