The Geoeconomic Turn in Global Health: Pathogen Access & Benefit Sharing As a Chokepoint [Guest Essay]

Readers,

It is election season in global health Geneva, trade-offs will become the norm in the coming weeks and months.

In parallel, significant ongoing global health negotiations, also provide opportunities for quid pro quos across disciplines. Global health is, without doubt a rising strategic bet for economies (wars or no wars).

In today's guest essay, leading global health scholar, Ilona Kickbusch examines the opportunities afforded by the negotiations on the Pathogen Access & Benefit Sharing at the WHO, while also reading this in the context of unilateral tariff wars affecting the pharmaceutical sector. She argues that both of these are "chokepoints", albeit at opposite ends. She follows up this piece from her earlier contribution for us: Health as a Strategic Leverage: Navigating Chokepoints with Diplomacy.

Global health is at the intersection of economic statecraft and political opportunism. Kickbusch says, health is no longer the humanitarian exception unaffected by power politics. It is moving to the "centre of this logic". Read on.

Later this month at the WTO, we are hosting a policy discussion looking at PABS through a trade lens. Details below. This is a small in-person event, and we will report back to you on what a select group of policymakers and experts tell us about this.

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Priti

Priti Patnaik, Founder & Publisher, Geneva Health Files

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I. GUEST ESSAY

By Ilona Kickbusch

Two dates should be at the forefront of global health strategists this September: on 14 September the Intergovernmental Working Group returns to Geneva for its eighth round, resuming the attempt to finish the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing annex that is the last lock on the door of the Pandemic Agreement.

On 29 September the broad tranche of the United States’ Section 232 tariffs on patented pharmaceuticals — a default rate of 100% — takes effect for every company not already inside the door. (Section 232 Pharmaceutical Tariffs 2026: The Complete Guide for Importers Before September 29 - Carra Globe). A group of seventeen firms have been under the regime since the end of July (Trump Pharma Tariffs: 100% Now in Effect, July 31, 2026.)

One process is a painstaking multilateral negotiation over how the world will share the biological raw material of pandemic response. The other is a unilateral act of economic statecraft reshaping where the world’s medicines are permitted to be made. They must be seen together as two moves in the evermore important game of geoeconomics.