Sawt Falasteen - WHO, Lula urge G7 action on finishing pandemic treaty

Wealthy countries and developing nations are at loggerheads over how the pandemic agreement, which was adopted last year, will work in practice.

In a joint open letter, the World Health Organization's chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva demanded that the G7 leaders show "political will at the highest level" to finalise a key missing part.

"The world must finish what it started," they wrote.

The agreement's unfinalised Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS) mechanism deals with sharing access to pathogens with pandemic potential, then sharing benefits derived from them, such as vaccines, tests and treatments.

The sticky part is deciding how the benefits deriving from pathogens are defined and then shared, how the system is governed, and how equity is guaranteed.

WHO member states' negotiators are due to meet again for more talks from July 6 to 17.

Tedros and Lula said they would need a lift from world leaders to make a breakthrough.

"Instruct your negotiators to come to the July session ready to conclude," they said.

"Treat July 17 as a deadline, not a milestone."

- Strategy, not charity -

The agreement -- aimed at preventing a repeat of the international disarray in responding to the Covid-19 pandemic -- cannot enter into force until the annex is finalised.

"Estimates from the WHO and others put the lives lost at up to 20 million," said Lula and Tedros.

"Humanity promised itself, in the rawness of that grief, that it would not face such a day again unprepared."

They recalled that the International Monetary Fund estimated that the Covid pandemic cost the world economy more than $13 trillion in lost output -- against which the investment in catching outbreaks early was tiny.

Scientists estimate there is a near one in four chance of another pandemic within the coming decade, they pointed out, adding that advances in biotechnology were being matched unevenly by biosafety, "raising the risk of accidental or deliberate release".

Countries sharing dangerous emerging pathogens must be able to trust that the vaccines and treatments born from that sharing will reach their own people, they said.

This is not charity but strategy, they insisted.

"A virus left to burn anywhere will, in time, find everyone," they said.

They noted that the world was one month into dealing with a deadly Ebola species outbreak in central Africa that has no known cure and no approved vaccines.

"Every month this annex stays unfinished is a month the world is less ready than it could be, and people are less safe than they deserve to be," they said.

Lula will be a guest at the G7 summit, being held from Monday to Wednesday in the French spa town of Evian.

Q.Najjar--SF-PST