Will the pandemic treaty get more time, or will it go down the toilet?

After the failure to secure a pandemic treaty draft ahead of this week’s World Health Assembly, questions are swirling about what happens next. Is there still hope to eke something out by the end of the week? Can another special session be held in a few months, at the end of the year, or even next year? Or does two years’ worth of negotiations simply go down the toilet? For all the complexity, “the options are rather straightforward,” said Roland Driece, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body, tasked with negotiating the terms of a pandemic agreement. “You can either continue with the aim of finishing it, or you could stop it. That’s all the flavors we have,” he said, adding that based on what he’s heard so far, the member states of the World Health Organization are opting for a continuation. Of course, within those binary options are myriad other decisions that have to be made, which Driece outlined at Devex’s CheckUp @ WHA77 event yesterday. “Is it in the same format as we’re having today? Or do you want to change that a little bit around because changing the scenery is sometimes useful to get the energy back in or get the process going again, whereas it’s stuck now? And for how long? Half a year, a year, two years?” However long it takes, Driece — who also serves as the director for international affairs at the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports in the Netherlands — doesn’t think now is the time to try to ram through an agreement. “The chances of finishing the discussions during the WHA are in my view zero. So why should you try to do that? Why do you push people who have been working very, very hard over the last two years into such a regime?” he told Devex Senior Reporter Jenny Lei Ravelo. “I think it’s wise to take enough time to tackle those really sticky issues that are still out there. Because if you look at the quantity of issues, we’ve solved a lot, but if you look at the quality of the issues still on the table, they’re not easy. They are about IP, they are about percentages that industry should be setting aside for delivery to countries most in need,” he said. “So they are really politically sensitive and difficult issues.” Fellow panelist Fifa Rahman, principal consultant at Matahari Global Solutions, was blunt about how tough those issues are given that lower-income and higher-income countries are at such loggerheads over them. Describing some countries as “opponents,” Rahman — who served as a technical adviser to the Africa group during the negotiations — said, “It’s about knowing your opponent and not conceding too early.” “These are opponents that spoke very highly of solidarity. But we need to remember that there were situations where close-to-expired vaccines were transmitted to the global south, right?” Rahman said. She specifically called out the United Kingdom, citing an April 28 Telegraph article that warned that WHO “will have the power to legally demand that Britain hands over 20 percent of its vaccines and drugs in a pandemic under a treaty due to be ratified next month.” To put that into perspective, though, Rahman pointed out that AstraZeneca produced roughly 3 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines. “But Britain only has 69 million people. Britain does not need 3 billion vaccines. So calculation-wise, we need to think about whether these countries really want equity or whether we’re arguing on diametrically opposed planes. “What we need is to have those difficult conversations on ‘what will you give me for this?’” she added. “And that’s happened in many other negotiations — in the TPP [Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement ] for example, when New Zealand said there will be no deal on biologics until there is a deal for dairy. And we need that conversation to happen here.” Those difficult conversations have presumably been underway behind closed doors, but most people haven’t been privy to the discussions — something the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body has been dinged for. Driece, though, defended the transparency of the process, saying that “all the different iterations of the texts we have are on the WHO website for everybody to see.” The problem is not everyone is bothering to look, and that has bred a maelstrom of misinformation. Driece recalled responding to one woman who emailed him complaining about the treaty. He asked her: “What are you afraid of? Where are your sources? Have you ever tried to read actually what it is? “And then it turns out of course that she never read what was in it,” he said. “One of the things that I’ve discovered these past two years that really frightens me a little bit is the sheer number of websites and so-called online TV shows that just thrive and live from misinformation. … But a lot of people like this lady, they follow that and they just do not bother reading what’s really going on, and … that frightens me when I’m in bed at night.” For all the fears, though — including that a pandemic treaty may never see the light of day — Driece expressed tempered optimism. “I think we all have to realize we started with nothing. You started with a blank sheet of paper. And if you see where we are now, I think we have all the elements on the table,” he said. “But a treaty is still a piece of paper. It’s not Harry Potter’s magical wand,” he cautioned, saying that while a pandemic treaty is “a good foundation to start improving the world, it will not improve the world the next day.”