A week of pandemic treaty talks in Geneva ends without a deal, again
The sixth negotiating round on the WHO Pandemic Agreement's pathogen-sharing annex was supposed to finish text ahead of May's World Health Assembly. Member states pushed the deadline to late April instead.
WHO member states have again failed to close the text of the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS) annex to the WHO Pandemic Agreement, extending negotiations for a second time this year after a week of talks in Geneva ended 28 March without agreement [s1].
What this round was supposed to settle
The sixth meeting of the Intergovernmental Working Group (IGWG) tasked with drafting the PABS annex ran 23–28 March in Geneva [s1]. The annex is meant to resolve the one major piece left unfinished when the WHO Pandemic Agreement itself was adopted in May 2025: how countries would rapidly share pathogens with pandemic potential, and how the benefits of that sharing — vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics developed using shared pathogen samples — would flow back to the countries that provided them, on an equal footing [s1]. Consensus on that mechanism, formally Article 12 of the Pandemic Agreement, was the one piece negotiators could not resolve before last year's adoption, which is why the IGWG process exists separately.
Going into the March session, the working group's stated goal was to finalize the annex text in time for the World Health Assembly to consider and adopt it in May [s1] — the same timeline this outlet reported when the IGWG's fifth round wrapped up in February with a self-imposed deadline pointed at the May Assembly.
Why it didn't close
WHO's own account of the outcome is direct: member states "recognized that additional time is needed to bridge remaining differences to finalize the text" [s1]. The specific sticking points named are ones that have persisted across multiple negotiating rounds — how to define and distribute the benefits arising from pathogen sharing, what contractual arrangements would govern that sharing in practice, and what governance structure would oversee the system once operational [s1]. These are not drafting details; they go to the core architecture of how a global pathogen-sharing system would actually function, and the fact that they remain open after a sixth formal round is one measure of how far apart delegations still are on fundamentals rather than language.
The new timeline
Negotiations will resume for a five-day session running 27 April to 1 May, with informal intersessional discussions planned in the weeks beforehand to narrow the gaps ahead of that formal round [s1]. That timing pushes the talks right up against the World Health Assembly itself, which is still expected to consider the finalized annex in May [s1] — meaning the working group is now negotiating on a compressed runway before the Assembly convenes, rather than arriving at the Assembly with settled text.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged delegations toward the negotiations' underlying purpose in a statement following the session, saying he was asking "all delegations to believe in the power of trust" in service of "solidarity and equity" [s1]. IGWG Co-Chair Ambassador Tovar da Silva Nunes characterized the state of talks as intensive but unfinished, saying negotiators were "working intensively towards having an ambitious and equitable" system ready for adoption in May [s1].
Why the repeated extensions matter
The PABS annex is not a peripheral technical annex — it is the mechanism the Pandemic Agreement depends on for its central bargain: that countries experiencing an outbreak share pathogen samples quickly enough for the world to develop countermeasures, in exchange for a guarantee that those countermeasures will actually reach them. Without a functioning PABS system, the broader Pandemic Agreement adopted in May 2025 has, in the areas that depend on rapid pathogen sharing, a structure without the operational mechanism it was built around. Each additional round that ends in extension rather than agreement compresses the time available before the Assembly and raises the practical question of whether a text can be finalized, translated into the WHO's official languages, and formally submitted for adoption within the remaining window — or whether May's Assembly will face the annex as unfinished business for a third consecutive session.
What to watch
The late-April session is now the effective deadline: it is the working group's last scheduled opportunity to produce agreed text before the Assembly convenes in May. Whether the informal intersessional discussions in the interim manage to resolve the benefit-sharing, contractual, and governance disputes that have carried across three rounds — rather than simply restating them — will determine whether the Assembly is asked to adopt a finished annex or to grant yet another extension.
Sources
- WHO Member States agree to extend negotiations on key annex to the Pandemic Agreement — World Health Organization, 28 March 2026
Sources
- WHO Member States agree to extend negotiations on key annex to the Pandemic Agreement — World Health Organization , March 28, 2026
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