Africa Asserts Itself as Pandemic Agreement Talks Resume

The Pandemic Agreement talks resume at the World Health Organization’s (WHO) headquarters on Monday (7 July), kicking off immediately with a closed session on how to share specimens of pathogens with pandemic potential.

While those close to the talks say that slow progress is being made, the 10-day negotiations (which ends 17 July) are unlikely to result in an agreed pathogen access and benefit-sharing (PABS) system just yet.

Africa is asserting itself in several global platforms, insisting on measures to level the playing field to ensure that the citizens of its 54 countries have better access to medicines, vaccines and diagnostics.

However, the continent’s demands are being met by the same obstacles that it faces in the PABS talks: an insistence, particularly by countries with powerful pharmaceutical interests, that intellectual property rights need to be respected.

At the recent United Nations High-Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS, the African group negotiated as a bloc – bar a handful of countries – and insisted on the inclusion of several paragraphs to encourage wider access to medicines, including local production, technology transfer and reward for innovation. Several Latin American countries also supported this position.

Africa also insisted on a last-minute amendment to the political declaration on HIV, proposing the removal of the phrase “mutually agreed terms” in relation to technology transfer in three paragraphs of the 15-page declaration. 

“The African group believes that keeping ‘on mutually agreed terms’ in the text in connection to technology transfer undermines the key objective to access medicines, vaccines, and medical products, and to boost research and development,” said Malawian Health Minister Madalitso Baloyi on behalf of the Africa Group.

While the political declaration passed, the European Union (EU), Switzerland, Canada and several other countries dissociated themselves from these paragraphs.

Switzerland said that technology transfer should “always be on mutually agreed terms”.

It also objected to a paragraph (85) that committed countries to improving the transparency of markets for HIV-related health technologies, by “publicising production costs and prices of HIV-related products, through global, regional and national mechanisms, thus providing consistent and transparent information for fair price negotiations”.

“There are limits anchored in relevant international law to publicising information, such as production cost. Paragraph 85 raises concern regarding the protection of trade secrets, and more fundamentally, what role of state authorities can be in relation to private sector actors,” said Switzerland.

‘No country alone can fight’

Meanwhile, WHO officials urged member states to hasten agreement of the PABS system, the last remaining piece standing in the way of the Pandemic Agreement being adopted.

“The outbreaks of hantavirus, Ebola and Marburg all show why there is no alternative to international cooperation in the face of international threats. No country alone can fight,” WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a media briefing last week.

Referring to the PABS talks, Tedros added: “Differences remain, but one thing is clear: countries remain committed to finding common ground, and consensus.”

WHO’s head of health emergencies, Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu, said that navigating several public health emergencies simultaneously was a trend which is likely to continue.

“The threats are not going away,” said Ihekweazu. “But hopefully we can get stronger collectively to respond to these.”

Several positive developments had evolved out of the recent threats, he added. These included countries improving their disease response detection and response capabilities,  R & D on new countermeasures, and opportunities for countries to work together under the International Health Regulations, the legally binding rules for country conduct during disease outbreaks.

But, stressed Ihekweazu, the PABS system “absolutely has to be completed” to enable the Pandemic Agreement to be ratified and brought into effect to establish a strong global framework to address disease outbreaks.