Last week, the UK adopted a a new World Health Organization Pandemic Agreement alongside 124 other nations. The agreement aims to embed stronger domestic and global prevention by improving the way countries around the world work together to detect and combat pandemic threats.
The new Pandemic Agreement seeks to help avoid excessive deaths and economic hardship witnessed during the COVID pandemic by creating a framework for countries to take action together to better prevent pandemics, notably by improving disease surveillance to detect and respond to new health threats sooner, and by speeding up innovation of life-saving vaccines and treatments.
This approach can help facilitate swifter pathogen and pathogen data sharing so the UK can act quickly to prevent further spread. It will also enable the UK to develop vaccines, treatments and tests faster, which will help save lives and drive economic growth in our world-leading life sciences sector.
There are no provisions that would give the World Health Organization powers to impose domestic public health decisions on the UK.
Key details outlined in the final text include:
- commitments on pandemic prevention, including for health, animal and environmental sectors to collaborate through a ‘One Health’ approach – a major step toward preventing disease spillover from animals to humans
- provisions that will foster innovation, enhance global research and development, and strengthen supply chains
The Pandemic Agreement paves the way for a new and voluntary Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) system which should see pharmaceutical companies get faster access to the pathogens and genetic sequences that they need to create new vaccines, treatments and tests to respond to a pandemic.
In return, manufacturers who voluntarily sign up to the system — not the government — will share a portion of their production with the World Health Organization to allocate where it is most needed.
The PABS system is entirely voluntary for pharmaceutical companies, who may choose to join to gain faster access to pathogen data for innovation. There are no requirements placed on governments to share vaccines or treatments they have purchased.
