In a time when rivalry is growing between powerful nation states, it is useful to reflect on areas where these rivals still have a national interest and need to coordinate. One example is the World Health Organizations (WHO) and the member states’ response to the coordination failures during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In December of 2021 the WHO convened the International Negotiating Body (INB) for only the second time in its existence. The purpose of the INB is to involve all regions of the world to draft and negotiate a “WHO convention, agreement, or other international instrument on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response” that will be adopted at the seventy-seventh World Health Assembly in May 2024. The goal is to create a so-called Pandemic Accord to ensure that humanity is better prepared for the next pandemic. The motivation for the INB and the pending pandemic accord are a direct result of the well documented failures of geopolitical coordination during the Covid-19 pandemic. These failures occurred despite many warnings from past pandemics and even within existing coordination frameworks such as the Global Health Security Agenda. Some of these failures can be explained through the growing great power competition between the US and China, in addition to the schism between Russia and the US/EU prior to and during the war in Ukraine, as international cooperation on public health diminished.
The INB in its current state is a work in progress, but it is progress. There is much to be done to ensure the pending divides between geopolitical rivals can be bridged, and that any pandemic accord negotiated during the INB improves global pandemic preparedness. For equitable access to vaccines, therapeutics and medicines there must be enforceable measures to ensure that countries with pandemic resources share with countries that have less, or with rivals. When it comes to intellectual property (IP) for pandemic mitigating products, high income countries must be more pragmatic and reduce their protections on certain types of IP. Low- and middle-income countries can fund more research and innovation themselves to create their own products or at least have access to key supply chains. Finally, to create sustainable global supply chains, the current supply chain and manufacturing system needs to be diversified, localized, and recognize that each county can play to its own strengths to help others.
Geopolitics is here to stay, and looks posed to grow in abrasiveness, but the INB is a great venue to at least minimize those tensions in health with a robust and enforceable treaty for the good of pandemic prevention and response. Three cheers for having faith in the Pandemic Accord drafting process.
