Newsletter Edition #165 [Treaty Talks]
Readers,
Time, tide and outbreaks await none.
It is hard to explain to many people why the negotiations on the Pathogen Access Benefits Sharing System at the WHO are so fascinating. (It is riveting enough that I worked on this edition over the weekend, ahead of the negotiations).
The tragic consequences of a harmful pathogen circulating and claiming lives, without effective and adequate diagnostics and medicines, is self-evident. Merely reading about the devastating, debilitating, and often, fatal realities facing a patient fighting Ebola is enough to spur action to catalyse change. (How fast can we prevent people from dying?)
The harsh battles from the field, the updates from health workers, the stories of burials, the effort by contact tracers and disease detectives, work by procurement agencies, scientists in labs – all of this response is collectively determined by policy design.
And it turns out, countries are bang in the middle of what has been a frustrating policy design. Current health emergencies including Ebola, mean there is sort of a desperate need to frame humane, workable and intelligent legal commitments that might shape preparedness and response in future health emergencies.
The story of these negotiations at the WHO began with COVID-19 which claimed 20 million lives. The Ebola emergency, among others, might provide an impetus to the last missing piece in the Pandemic Agreement - the PABS mechanism. While no longer posing a public health risk, the hanta virus outbreak aboard a nature cruise, also captured public imagination in this feverish summer.
Having reported on these negotiations for five plus years, this does feel like an unusual moment, like coming a full circle. And yet, not all makers of the PABS system, would feel the compulsions. After all, the structural commercial and political logic underpinning health systems and economies remain unchanged. As we reported earlier, countries seem to be drawing their own lessons from these unfolding emergencies.
We hope you find today’s story helpful. It is complicated and gray. Like most things in global health. My colleagues Vineeth and Anjan, helped me put this together.
There are three parts to this edition.
- Indications on information sharing from current outbreaks
- Questions it raises for PABS negotiations
- Views from experts
More from us in the coming days. We will be onsite at the WHO to track how the discussions are simmering this month. You can help us report these closed-door negotiations that are both, time and resource intensive. Support our work?
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Thank you for your engagement.
Best,
Priti
Priti Patnaik, Founder & Publisher, Geneva Health Files
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Presenting our weekly in-depth analysis on global health that captures the big picture and the nuances like no one else does. This is an exclusive edition for our subscribers.
I. GHF ANALYSIS
How a Live Debate on the Sharing and Access to Pathogen Information Could Affect Negotiations Over a Rules-Based System at the WHO
By Vineeth Penmetsa & Priti Patnaik
On 17 May 2026, WHO declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern in response to an outbreak of Bundibugyo ebolavirus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. It was the seventeenth time DRC had faced Ebola, but only the second outbreak ever caused by the Bundibugyo strain, a virus for which no licensed vaccine or treatment exists. The following day, the Africa CDC declared a public health emergency of continental security.
Within days, the genomic data was already circulating widely. Anyone with an internet connection could see it.
This piece traces how that information moved – through formal databases and bilateral channels – and what that movement reveals about the unresolved questions in the negotiations on WHO’s Pathogen Access Benefits Sharing (PABS) System. The access to information is a key area that needs an urgent breakthrough in these negotiations. The wider Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response agenda rests on the PABS annex to the WHO Pandemic Agreement.
We zoom out and analyse lessons as negotiations commence in Geneva this week. For this story, we spoke with several diplomats, experts and representatives from databases, reviewed documents, and examined publicly available intelligence.
