The World Health Organization is currently undertaking two processes aiming at improving prevention, preparation and response to future pandemics. However, global health and equity issues are increasingly slipping out of focus in the negotiations.
The Working Group on amendments to the IHR (WGIHR) aims to strengthen the International Health Regulations (IHR) and the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) is developing a pandemic accord to focussed on ensuring equitable access to vaccines and medicines.
Below, Melissa Scharwey, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Advocacy Officer, provides an overview of the negotiations and calls on WHO members to focus on ensuring equitable access to medical goods between and within countries, regardless of wealth or social status.
Melissa Scharwey writes:
Médecins Sans Frontières teams around the world have seen firsthand how the COVID-19 pandemic starkly exposed huge inequalities in access to medical drugs and supplies.
In India or Malawi, people died because there was not enough oxygen. In South Africa, patients had to be treated without protective clothing because there was a lack of material.
When the first drugs to treat COVID-19 were approved, hope arose. But they were so expensive that very few people could afford them. The situation was similar with the vaccine.
By the time most people in Australia had already received their third vaccination, in some countries not even healthcare workers had received their first.
That is why the members of the World Health Organization (WHO) are currently negotiating an agreement on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response: the Pandemic Treaty.
The goal of this agreement is to create a legally binding instrument to better prevent pandemics and, in the event of an outbreak of a new pandemic, to be able to respond as a global community quickly, coherently and in line with needs. The treaty is also a way to shape global health according to need rather than pharmaceutical companies’ profit motives.
Real change not charity
The main sticking points in the negotiations are the provisions that are supposed to regulate equitable access to and distribution of medical goods such as diagnostics, medicines, vaccines or even oxygen. Equitable access includes fair, equitable, and timely access to affordable, safe, and effective pandemic control products between and within countries, including between populations, regardless of their social or economic status.
Middle- and low-income countries are no longer satisfied with a welfare model that leaves power with the powerful and puts most countries at the mercy of a few.
Clear demands are being made in the pandemic treaty negotiations by the African Countries Group and the Group on Equity (a coalition of over 19 countries, including Bangladesh, Botswana, Brazil, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, South Africa, Tanzania) for middle- and low-income countries with suitable manufacturing capacity to be able to produce and supply their region in line with demand.
From a humanitarian perspective, MSF believes that the core of the WHO treaty must address global health and equity issues so that next time a pandemic hits, the knowledge and technology needed to produce tests, vaccines and drugs will be shared and pharmaceutical companies will not again be allowed to enforce their patents and monopolise the production and sale of vaccines themselves.
We are also calling for clear commitments to ensure equitable access to medical countermeasures in the event of a pandemic. As the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated, voluntary measures are not enough.
To achieve these aims, MSF is asking members of the WHO to commit to the following in negotiating the Treaty:
- That fundamental values such as human rights and the principle of solidarity serve as guidelines and are consistently implemented.
- That binding rules on sharing data and technologies be created so that qualified manufacturers can enter the production of medical countermeasures.
- That Governments that share data on pathogens be rewarded for their cooperation.
- That in the event of a pandemic, a temporary suspension of intellectual property rights (including patents) is made possible and simplified to prevent the artificial shortage caused by the monopoly position of individual corporations.
- That public investments in research and development be linked to conditions for equitable access.
See here for Croakey’s archive of stories on the WHO’s efforts to improve global health
