Pandemic treaty talks inched forward in Geneva. The hard part is still open

WHO Member States met in Geneva from January 20 to 22 for a resumed session of the fourth meeting of the Intergovernmental Working Group negotiating the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing annex to the WHO Pandemic Agreement [s1]. They left with progress in several areas and the difficult questions still unresolved [s1].

What PABS is meant to do

The Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing system is intended to enable safe, transparent and accountable sharing of pathogens with pandemic potential and their genetic sequence information, alongside the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from their use — including vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics [s1].

That single sentence contains the entire dispute. Sharing pathogen samples and sequences quickly is what makes fast vaccine development possible; it is also, from the perspective of the countries where outbreaks begin, the moment at which they hand over the input to products they may not be able to afford. The annex is an attempt to make one conditional on the other.

How the talks got here

The IGWG's fourth meeting ran for five days in Geneva, from December 1 to 5 [s2]. It did not finish the annex. Rather than wait for the next scheduled session, countries decided to extend the negotiations and reconvene in January to accelerate drafting [s2] — adding negotiating time instead of deferring the text, which is the choice a body makes when it believes agreement is reachable but has not reached it.

The December language was commitment without closure. Member States "have demonstrated real commitment to finding common ground and bridging differences," Harpur said then [s2]. Nunes said they "have shown their dedication to finishing this important task" [s2]. Tedros called the effort "both a generational opportunity and a generational responsibility" [s2].

Those are the words of a process that has settled on the goal and not on the mechanism.

What came out of January

The co-chairs' reports were positive but bounded. "I am encouraged by the progress we have made in several areas, with signs of emerging consensus for some parts of the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing system," said Ambassador Tovar da Silva Nunes of Brazil, an IGWG Bureau co-chair [s1]. Matthew Harpur of the United Kingdom, the other co-chair, said Member States "have engaged in constructive discussions this week" [s1].

Outstanding and complex issues in the draft annex remain unresolved [s1].

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus framed the stakes in structural terms: "A strong Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing system will be a cornerstone of a safer and more equitable world" [s1].

Read against the December session, where the co-chairs described Member States as having demonstrated "real commitment to finding common ground and bridging differences" [s2], the January language is incrementally more concrete — "emerging consensus for some parts" rather than commitment in principle — and still short of agreed text on the contested provisions.

The clock

The annex is intended for adoption at the World Health Assembly, and the January statement identifies the Seventy-ninth World Health Assembly in May 2026 as the target [s1]. A fifth IGWG meeting is scheduled for February 9 to 14 [s2].

That leaves a small number of negotiating days between now and the deadline for issues that have resisted resolution across multiple sessions.

Why this is slow

It is tempting to read repeated sessions as failure. A more useful reading is that the annex is attempting something international health law has not previously achieved: a standing, pre-negotiated mechanism that binds access to material and access to product.

Ad hoc arrangements have been made before, under pressure, during outbreaks. Doing it in advance means settling in peacetime the questions that are usually settled — badly, and to the advantage of whoever already has manufacturing capacity — in an emergency. Those questions are genuinely hard, and the parties negotiating them have divergent interests that are not resolved by goodwill.

There is also a structural reason the endgame compresses. An annex of this kind is negotiated as a package: countries withhold agreement on individual provisions because each is collateral for concessions elsewhere. That produces long stretches in which little appears to move, followed by a short period in which everything resolves at once — or does not.

Slowness is not by itself evidence that the process is broken. Missing the Assembly deadline would be a more meaningful signal.

What to watch

Whether the February session produces agreed text on the outstanding issues, or another extension.

Whether the definition work continues to advance. The co-chairs identify emerging consensus on some parts of the system as the January session's result, without specifying which [s1] — so the content of what has actually been settled will only be visible when text is published.

And whether the Assembly in May adopts an annex, adopts a partial one, or defers. The Pandemic Agreement's practical force in the next outbreak depends substantially on which of those happens.