Commentary on the WHO’s Draft Pandemic Agreement: Pointless Verbiage

Commentary on the WHO’s Draft Pandemic Agreement: Pointless Verbiage
by Thi Thuy Van Dinh at Brownstone Institute

Background

The draft Pandemic Agreement (PA) has been under development for three years by delegates of 194 Member States of the World Health Organization (WHO), the health agency of the United Nations instituted after the Second World War. The WHO has been pushing to negotiate a pandemic treaty or accord to better prepare the world for pandemic preparedness, prevention, and response, in parallel with a new set of amendments to the 2005 International Health Regulations (IHR). 

The IHR amendments were pushed to a vote at the 77th World Health Assembly (WHA) in 2024, less than 48 hours after negotiations on them finished. This haste was in blatant violation of the WHO’s own procedural requirements. In December 2021, the WHA instituted the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) to negotiate the PA, but this body failed to reach agreement for the 2024 WHA.

It was then mandated “to finish its work as soon as possible” (Decision WHA77/20) and no later than a year. The WHO has tried to add to the sense of haste, with its Director-General (DG) recently claiming that the next pandemic could occur “tomorrow.” Drafts of the PA, along with the IHR amendments, seek to centralize management of pandemics and pandemic preparedness in the WHO, considerably expanding its role in public health.

For context, the PA and the IHR amendments are squarely aimed at naturally occurring outbreaks, being heavily oriented to surveillance for pathogens arising, in particular, from animal reservoirs (“spillovers”). The recent Covid-19 pandemic, being almost certainly the result of a laboratory escape, therefore has little relevance to much of the proposed changes. The last high mortality acute outbreak was the Spanish flu over a century ago in the pre-antibiotic era.

Equally important is the competence of the WHO in potentially having an expanded role. The WHO maintained for years that a lab leak was highly unlikely as a cause for Covid, including on its investigative panel people suspected of sharing responsibility for work leading to the probable leak. It then publicly insisted that there was no human-to-human transmission of the virus as reports increased of spread in the population in Wuhan, China, and subsequently provided highly flawed and exaggerated case fatality rates. 

Despite extensive and early evidence of low harm from Covid-19 to children, the WHO was essentially silent as schools were closed for hundreds of millions of children, setting the scene for raised child marriage, child labor, and future intergenerational poverty. The WHO’s COVAX mass vaccination campaign then spent nearly $10 billion vaccinating people it knew were mostly already immune, and never at high risk (50% of sub-Saharan populations were less than 20 years of age).

To promote its pandemic preparedness, prevention, response (PPPR) agenda and the increased funding it is requesting to support this, the WHO and the wider global health industry looking to benefit have embarked on an unusual campaign of demonstrable misrepresentation and confusion. Countries and the media have been provided with a series of reports shown to greatly exaggerate the available evidence and citations on the risk of pandemics occurring, exaggerate expected mortality (mostly based on Medieval data), and exaggerate the expected return on investment. This has been frustrating, and while the PA calls for better adherence to honesty and evidence, it directs these recommendations to countries rather than the WHO itself.

A Fast-Tracked Negotiation Process with Flawed Lessons Learned from Covid Management and without the WHO’s Largest Funder

On 16 April 2025, the WHO announced that a draft of the PA had been agreed and was ready for consideration by the 78th WHA, thanks to “multilateralism.” This was reached a few months after the WHO’s largest contributor for both core funding and voluntary programs, the United States, walked away. Intergovernmental negotiation processes by the US delegation on the draft PA and the 2024 amendments to the IHR (for which States must indicate their rejection by the 19th July 2025) were already ordered to cease.

The text of the draft PA contains 37 articles. The language of controversial ones has been much watered down to reach consensus, considerably softening State’s obligations and leaving key areas of implementation to the future COP and annexes. About half of substantive provisions (art. 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 14, 18, and 19) merely highlight abstract or meaningless assertions on areas that countries, within their capacities, are already engaged in the normal course of running their health systems.

Overall, one may wonder whether this text was finalized in order to save the faces of the WHO’s leadership who don’t hide their ambition to have this accord approved, and of countries displeased with the US’s unilateral trade and foreign policies, including its recent withdrawal from the WHO and some other international entities (UNESCO, Human Rights Council, World Trade Organization). 

The language continues to contradict previous WHO understanding and public health norms, promoting whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches rather than proportionate measures that minimize societal disruption and long-term harm, and ignores the basic policy requirement of considering any resource allocations against other competing priorities. Equity, as during the Covid-19 pandemic, seems to be considered as commodity equity rather than health equity – important for building commodity markets but clearly detrimental to health outcomes.

Health, recognized in the WHO Constitution’s Preamble as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not nearly the absence of disease or infirmity,” has been significantly redefined by the WHO as a-world-without-risk-of-pandemics in the last few years. This is contributing to the building of a pandemic industry or gravy train, heavily funded and with an apparent low requirement for evidence. The PA, while demanding little immediately from countries beyond platitudes, will contribute significantly to this process of wealth concentration and inequality simply by passing the WHA vote.

What Is Next?

The approval of the text will be tabled in the agenda of the upcoming 78th WHA (19-27 May 2025). A two-thirds vote of Member States present and voting will be required for its adoption (Art. 29, WHO’s Constitution).

Article 19, WHO’s Constitution

The Health Assembly shall have authority to adopt conventions or agreements with respect to any matter within the competence of the organization. A two-thirds vote of the Health Assembly shall be required for the adoption of such conventions or agreements, which shall come into force for each Member when accepted by it in accordance with its constitutional processes.

If the text is not passed, the WHA may decide to prolong the INB’s mandate again, or just end the attempt. Other pandemic instruments are already in place – the IHR amendments, the WHO’s Bio-Hub (International Pathogen Surveillance Network) and Medical Countermeasures Platform, the World Bank’s Pandemic Fund, and the 100 Days to Vaccine initiative. The PA is some additional icing on the pandemic cake, and perhaps a support for bruised egos and an attempt to prove that countries don’t agree with the United States’ withdrawal. 

If the text is passed, within 18 months, each Member State has the obligation to notify the DG of its intent – acceptance or non-acceptance (Art. 20, WHO’s Constitution). Those who accept will ratify the agreement according to the procedure laid out in Article 36 of the PA. Sixty (60) ratifications will be required for the agreement to enter into force – a threshold remarkably higher than multiple international treaties (for example, the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control only requires 40 ratifications). 

Will the architecture and functioning of the new governing body of the PA imitate the setting of another controversial international treaty – the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change? With annual Conferences of Parties (COP) that bring an enormous number of participants to the fanciest and most expensive places on fossil-fueled transportation means, to reduce the use of fossil fuels, this treaty is arguably the most dishonest, hypocritical framework ever established. Perhaps in the near future, highly-maintained governmental and non-governmental structures, PPP (public-private partnerships), and the industry will also yearly discuss polished modeling results and hypotheses far from the daily life of the voiceless billions. They, who fund the bureaucrats, look ever more detached from the needs and aspirations of ‘the peoples’ that UN agencies ostensibly represent.

Commentary on Selected Draft Articles

Most of the PA is non-binding and steeped in language such as “may,” “where appropriate,” and “when mutually agreed,” with controversial areas that delayed the vote from the last WHA concerning intellectual property, benefits derived from biological materials, and the overall financing mechanism either made toothless through the use of meaningless language, or passed to a COP to be made up if the countries will ratify the agreement.

The commentary below focuses on selected draft provisions that seem to be unclear, questionable, or potentially problematic. The text should be considered in the context of the 2024 amendments to the IHR that are scheduled to enter into force for States Parties who do not reject them by 19 July 2025. These amendments already set up provisions and mechanisms for the highly profitable pandemic industry, by obligating States to strengthen their surveillance and reporting capacity for potential pathogens, providing the DG with sole power to declare an emergency based purely on perception of risk, and then open a process leading to recommendations for lockdown-related measures and rapid mass vaccination. As with the PA, the WHO is also tasked with handling health products and in-kind contributions without a clear accountability mechanism. A new ‘States Parties Committee,’ yet another new body, is created to monitor implementation of the IHR amendments. 

Preamble

Like most such documents, the Preamble is primarily a list of platitudes but also important context for the succeeding articles. The first paragraph includes the key assertion:

1. …States bear the primary responsibility for the health and well-being of their peoples…

A question in international public health that underlies the controversy around the pandemic agenda is; do they also have complete freedom (i.r. sovereignty) to decide how this responsibility is enacted? Paragraph 3, expanded from Article 2 of the WHO’s Constitution, suggests the WHO has a ‘directing’ role in this:

3. World Health Organization is the directing and coordinating authority on international health work

Much therefore depends on how ‘directing’ is considered. While early drafts of the PA (and the IHR amendments) were written as this, giving the WHO authority to require actions of States, the eventual wording in this final draft removes most of the ability to require actions of countries – at least until a future COP should decide on outstanding issues.

4. Recalling the Constitution of the World Health Organization, which states that the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition,

This statement, also from the WHO’s Constitution’s Preamble, is often repeated but clearly unimplementable, and is unfortunately chosen in preference to the Constitution’s definition of health, which should be extremely relevant to the PA’s focus on a relatively rare event of limited burden: “health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not nearly the absence of disease or infirmity.”

Generalized, authoritative measures during Covid like closures of schools, religious institutions, and workplaces, and imposition of travel restrictions and vaccine mandates were not advised against by the WHO, suggests that the WHO sees the highest attainable standard of health in extremely narrow terms, largely willing to sacrifice the interests of hundreds of millions of children for a theoretical gain in mostly obese, elderly Western populations. This underlies the greatest problem with the PA and the WHO’s general pandemic agenda – its apparent absence of proportionality.

7. Recognizing that the international spread of disease is a global threat with serious consequences for lives, livelihoods, societies and economies that calls for the widest possible international and regional collaboration, cooperation and solidarity with all people and countries,

No one can really oppose this statement, except by putting it into context with other health and societal challenges. Such consideration in context is fundamental to developing public health policy, but essentially absent from the PA.

8. Deeply concerned by the inequities at national and international levels that hindered timely and equitable access to health products to address coronavirus disease (COVID-19), …,

Increasing inequity was a disastrous consequence of the Covid response – poor countries became more heavily indebted, while poorer children’s education was decimated compared to a world with more billionaires. However, the concern here is placed on unequal access and distribution of medical interventions. The reality that countries did not face the same threats from Covid-19 – half of Africa’s population is less than 20 years old – is forgotten here. Health equity would require a truly decentralized approach, where the predominant health problems of a population drives the agenda rather than access to a particular commodity.

9. Recognizing the need for resolute action to both strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response and to improve equitable access to pandemic-related health products, … while respecting States’ rights to implement health measures in accordance with their relevant national law and obligations under international law,(…)

To achieve equity, PPPR could only be implemented in context of wider health needs and local priorities (i.e. to achieve health equity). While this understanding is fundamental to good public health policy, it is missing from the PA.

10. Recognizing the critical role of whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches at national and community levels, through broad social participation, and further recognizing the value…[of] traditional knowledge…including traditional medicine, in strengthening pandemic prevention, preparedness, response and health systems recovery,

Seemingly innocuous, the ‘whole-of-government, whole-of-society’ rhetoric is probably one of the most damaging statements that normalize the Covid-19 public health approach. Previously, it was widely recognized that efforts should be made to minimize disruption to society whilst responding to an epidemic: “Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted,” as poverty and economic decline costs lives, particularly in lower-income countries.

States should not rationally redesign their health systems around pandemics, but are being asked to. The inclusion of traditional medicine and traditional knowledge appears hollow, given the emphasis on WHO-approved vaccination and limited allopathic medicines during the Covid outbreak.

15. Recognizing the importance of building trust and ensuring the timely sharing of information to prevent misinformation, disinformation and stigmatization,

All would agree with the importance of building trust on honest, science-based information. The WHO has demonstrated poor understanding, from its fundamentally incoherent Covid vaccine slogan “No one is safe until everyone is safe” to exaggerated claims and apparent fear-mongering by the WHO regarding the risk of the next pandemic.

Efforts against HIV/AIDS stigmatization were considered humane and effective. However, the Covid response demonstrated clearly that stigmatization is also a tool the WHO is willing to use. It is hoped that countries here recognized a need to bring the WHO into line, but the text reads like standard rhetoric.

19. Recognizing the importance and public health impact of growing threats such as climate change, poverty and hunger, fragile and vulnerable settings, weak primary health care and the spread of antimicrobial resistance,

This final paragraph reflects the WHO trying to expand its mandate from specific environmental issues on human health (chemical waste, sanitation, pollutions) to “the link between health, environment and climate change.” (Resolution WHA77.14 and DG’s nomination of the first WHO Special Envoy for Climate Change and Health in 2023).

Chapter I. Introduction

Article 1. Use of terms

This article contains definitions of terms used: humanitarian settings, One Health approach, pandemic emergency, pandemic-related health products, etc. For consistency of the PA and the IHR, the former uses the same definitions of “pandemic emergency” as introduced in 2024, “public health emergency of international concern” (PHIEC), and “public health risk.” Under the IHR, only the DG has the prerogative to declare a “public health emergency of international concern” (Art. 12.1, IHR) and determine whether it is also a pandemic emergency (Art. 12.4 bis, IHR) and can make non-binding recommendations to States, following a procedure laid out by the IHR although this prerogative isn’t accompanied by any accountability mechanism. 

The “pandemic emergency” definition is highly subjective, including “whole-of-government” and “whole of society” approaches. In a saner world, it might be considered that this excludes them from ever being proclaimed, as minimizing harm and unproductive disruption to society should be of paramount concern. Therefore, the same critique of the 2024 IHR amendment would also apply to the PA, that the threshold for PHIEC and pandemic emergencies has been lowered to include risks and threats. 

Article 3. Principles and approaches

The draft indicates 6 principles that will “guide” parties: State’s sovereignty, “full respect for the dignity, human rights and fundamental freedom of all persons” etc., respect of international humanitarian law, equity, solidarity, and “the best available science and evidence as the basis for public health decisions for PPPR.” It is very helpful to have them stated. As guiding principles, they likely will not prevent derogations such as general lockdowns, but should do so. 

4. Equity as a goal, principle and outcome of pandemic prevention, preparedness and response, striving in this context for the absence of unfair, avoidable or remediable differences among and between individuals, communities and countries;

This definition of equity, applied to a specific issue (pandemic prevention) as it was to Covid vaccination, is intrinsically flawed. The WHO emphasized ‘vaccine equity’ during the Covid-19 response, meaning equal access irrespective of need. The PA notes a diverse world – this should imply heterogeneity of implementation, and availability of commodities, based on local context – Icelanders do not need immediate access to malaria medicines in the way children in Malawi do. An emphasis on health equity – striving to ensure overall good health outcomes – would look very different. 

Chapter II. The world together equitably: Achieving equity in, for and through pandemic prevention, preparedness and response

Article 4. Pandemic prevention and surveillance

This article essentially repeats the IHR amendments’ emphasis on surveillance, and general measures that countries normally undertake in healthcare. Sub-paragraph 4.6 mandates the COP to address the implementation of States, i.e., through guidelines and technical assistance, and subparagraph 4.7 specifies that the WHO can help developing countries to implement their obligations upon request. Paragraph 2(i) mentions laboratory bio-safety – the only area in the PA that has direct implications for the probable origins of Covid-19.

Paragraph 4 is the only direct mention in the PA of the main determinants of individual outcome from infection:

1. The Parties recognize that a range of environmental, climatic, social, anthropogenic and economic factors, including hunger and poverty, may increase the risk of pandemics, and shall endeavour to consider these factors in the development and implementation of relevant policies, strategies, plans, and/or measures,…

Individual resilience is otherwise ignored – a remarkable feat given the importance of comorbidities in Covid-19 outcomes and micronutrient status in forming competent immunological responses.

Article 5. One Health approach for pandemic prevention, preparedness and response

This article uses the trending One Health approach – or the old-fashioned holistic approach of public health – to reinforce the PA’s near-exclusive focus on natural pandemics.

Article 9. Research and development

This long article of mostly motherhood statements prescribes what States have been doing anyway for Research and development for R&D pandemics. It concentrates on commodities: “…pandemic-related vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics…” The pandemic industry has found a goose with golden eggs. Section 5 (v) at the end is of significance, though:

5. (v) adherence to product allocation frameworks adopted by WHO.

This provision indicates a future obligation for States, presumably more developed countries, to build in development/funding grants and contracts with compulsory clauses for low pricings, licensing, and sub-licensing products to less-developed countries. It will presumably be a subject of the COP to clarify this, but suggests a concerning intrusion of the WHO into what is normally considered strictly the business of sovereign States (regulating and managing their own manufacturing businesses, pricing and exports). 

Article 10. Sustainable and geographically diversified production

Mostly non-binding but suggested cooperation on making pandemic-related products available, including support for manufacturing both during and between pandemics (i.e., through subsidies). Much of this is probably unimplementable, as it is expensive and impractical to maintain facilities in most or all countries on stand-by for rare events, at the cost of resources otherwise useful for other priorities. The desire to increase production in ‘developing’ countries will face major barriers and costs in terms of maintaining quality of production.

Subparagraph 2(c):

[Countries will]…actively support relevant WHO technology, skills and knowledge transfer and local production programmes,…

and paragraph 3:

3. WHO shall, upon request of the Conference of the Parties, provide assistance to the facilities referenced under paragraph 2 above, including, as appropriate, with respect to training, capacity-building, and timely support for development and production of pandemic-related products

are taking the WHO, a public health bureaucracy, into an area of manufacturing expertise that they are clearly not skilled or capable in. Countries need to decide whether they are setting up an entirely new sub-agency that somehow maintains manufacturing expertise unfettered by intellectual property concerns, and capable of intervening in private industry to promote biotech manufacturing. This seems highly unrealistic, and perhaps not well thought through.

In addition, subparagraph 3(e), despite the mild wording (“encourage”), opens a worm can of conflicts of interest by the pandemic industry: international organizations (e.g. WHO, World Bank, UNICEF) and developers and manufacturers who will greatly benefit from any long-term procurement contracts. There is no specific process to manage such inevitable self-serving.  

3(e) [The parties shall (…)] encourage international organizations and other relevant organizations to establish arrangements, including appropriate long-term contracts for pandemic-related health products, including through procurement from facilities referenced under paragraph 2(a) and pursuant to the objectives of Article 13, especially those produced by local and/or regional manufacturers in developing countries;

Article 11. Transfer of technology and cooperation on related know-how for the production of pandemic-related products

This article, always problematic for large pharmaceutical corporations sponsoring much WHO outbreak activities, has been much watered down (“as appropriate,” “encourage,” “in accordance with national laws and policies”) and now keep technology/know-how transfer in potential bi/tri-lateral agreements among a few countries concerned (“as mutually agreed”). It is now so non-specific that its presence makes no difference to the PA.

Article 12. Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing

This article establishes the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing System (PABS System), which is intended to ensure: i) the rapid and timely sharing of “materials and sequence information on pathogens with pandemic potential” and ii) the rapid, timely, fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the sharing and/or utilization of PABS Materials and Sequence Information for public health purposes. It refers to the “PABS Instrument” to be developed and agreed as an annex to the PA, which will give “definitions of pathogens with pandemic potential, PABS Materials and Sequence Information, modalities, legal nature, terms and conditions, and operational dimensions,” as well as “the terms for the administration and coordination” of the PABS System by the WHO. Once the PA enters into force and the first COP is convened within one year later, the development of such an Instrument would begin, and the COP will adopt it as an integral part of the PA. 

The theme of access and benefit-sharing has been contentious between developing countries on one hand and developed countries on the other hand. The first group, often rich in biodiversity and resources, does not have sufficient investment capacity and commercial infrastructure to make the products intended to profit from them, while the second group has such capacity. Thus, regulating ownership, access, and benefit-sharing terms and conditions is a legitimate group request.

Nevertheless, this is an opaque way to operate in international law, with repetitive rounds of failures for negotiating delegations failing to reach consensus, and the can now being kicked down the road to the COP. Draft treaties are in principle well scrutinized by countries before ratification, but future annexes and amendments do not gain the same attention.

This system is of potential high relevance and needs to be interpreted in the context that SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen causing the recent Covid-19 outbreak, was highly likely to have escaped from a laboratory. PABS is intended to expand the laboratory storage, transport, and handling of such viruses, under the “administration and coordination” by the WHO, an organization outside of national jurisdiction with no significant direct experience in handling biological materials, and subject through its funding to inevitable commercial and geopolitical interference.

The future Instrument will also define the clause of (minimum) 10% of real-time production of vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics to be donated to the WHO by “each participating manufacturer” and another 10% to be reserved at special prices for the WHO. These percentages are pre-determined irrespective of actual needs and epidemiology. Moreover, the future Instrument will also include benefit-sharing provisions pursuant to the “legally binding contracts signed by participating manufacturers with WHO” (para 7). 

The same entity, the WHO, that determines whether the triggering emergency exists, determines the response, manages the PABS system, and signs contracts with potential manufacturers who want to get access to the PABS, will also manage benefit from the commodities (including the global supply chain (Art. 13), without direct jurisdictional oversight. This is such an obvious conflict of interest that no rational jurisdiction would allow it. It is a remarkable system to suggest, irrespective of political or regulatory environment.

Article 13. Supply chain and logistic

This article foresees an additional bureaucratic structure, the ‘Global Supply Chain and Logistics Network,’ with its functions and modalities defined at the first COP. 

The WHO, with very limited current logistics experience, will manage distribution for commercially-produced products, to be supplied under WHO contracts when and where the WHO determines.

Having mutual support coordinated between countries is good. Having this run by an organization that is significantly funded directly by those gaining from the sale of these same commodities is reckless and counterintuitive. Few countries would allow this within their own jurisdictions.

Article 13bis. Procurement and distribution

This article contains non-binding provisions and would look more appropriate in a voluntary code of conduct than a binding treaty.

Each Party shall endeavour, as appropriate, during a pandemic, in accordance with national and/or domestic law and policies, to publish the relevant terms of its purchase agreements with manufacturers for pandemic-related health products at the earliest reasonable opportunity

Such transparency, unlike the secrecy applied to contracts during the Covid-19 outbreak, would be good, though why it only applies during a pandemic is unclear. However, there are so many caveats built into the paragraph that it is essentially meaningless.

Article 17. Whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches 

A list of essentially motherhood provisions related to planning for a pandemic. However, countries will legally be required to maintain a “national coordination multi-sectoral mechanism” for PPPR. This will essentially be an added burden on budgets, and divert further resources from potentially higher priorities. Simply strengthening current infectious disease and nutritional programs would be more impactful. Nowhere in this PA is nutrition discussed, though this is essential for resilience to pathogens, while other drivers of resilience to infectious disease like sanitation and clean water are similarly neglected.

The Parties are encouraged to apply whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches at national level, including, according to national circumstances, to empower and enable community ownership

This wording on “community ownership” directly contradicts much of the rest of the PA, including the centralization of control under the COP, requirements for countries to allocate resources to pandemic preparedness over other community priorities, and the idea of inspecting and assessing adherence to the requirements of the Agreement. “Whole of society (and government)” approaches also imply quite the opposite of communities making their own decisions. If communities are to be decision-makers here, then much of the rest of the PA is redundant. Alternately, this wording is purely for appearance and not to be followed (and therefore should be removed).

Article 18. Communication and public awareness 

This article has had wording that seemed to promote censorship removed. 

1. Each Party shall, as appropriate, take measures to strengthen science, public health and pandemic literacy in the population, as well as access to transparent, timely, accurate, science- and evidence-based information on pandemics and their causes, impacts and drivers, as well as on the efficacy and safety of pandemic related health products, particularly through risk communication and effective community level engagement. 

2. Each Party shall, as appropriate, conduct research and inform policies on factors that hinder or strengthen adherence to public health and social measures in a pandemic and trust in science and public health institutions, authorities and agencies.

3. In furtherance of Paragraph 1 and 2 of this Article, WHO shall, as appropriate and upon request, continue to provide technical support to States Parties, especially developing countries towards communication and public awareness of pandemic related measures.

Such provisions should not need a treaty (providing honest information) and as they are not binding, the article is not worth one. However, it is hoped that the WHO, not subject to the wording on honesty, can follow in spirit. The WHO has been systematically misrepresenting both the risk of pandemics and the expected return on investment from addressing them. In the Covid-19 response, its nonsensical slogan “No one is safe until everyone is safe” was both misrepresenting heterogeneity of risk and misrepresenting the Covid vaccine effectiveness against transmission (though correctly casting doubt on their claimed protective efficacy).

Article 20. Sustainable financing

This article establishes a Coordinating Financing Mechanism (CFM) to promote the implementation of the PA. The current text anticipates the CFM to be established under the IHR (2005) “shall be utilized as the mechanism” but then passes detail to the COP to determine. The CFM will be in parallel to the Pandemic Fund recently commenced by the World Bank, or the COP will establish it under the existing Pandemic Fund mechanism. It will also be additive to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, and other health financing mechanisms, thus establishing or expanding another parallel international financial bureaucracy, competing against other health priorities rather than coordinated with them and in this case addressing a relatively rare and low-burden problem. It will not just be managing finance, but other activities such as “conduct relevant needs and gaps analyses.” Surely, the pandemic industry will grow further.

Chapter III. Institutional arrangements and final provisions

Article 21. Conference of the Parties

This article contains standard provisions of international treaties. Of note, the first COP will take place in the first year following the PA’s entry into force. Article 21.2 foresees that the COP will “take stock” of the implementation of this Agreement and “review its functioning” every five years. 

The second COP will approve a “mechanism to strengthen effective implementation of the provisions of the Agreement.” This sounds like a sort of review mechanism, known in some international treaties but not all, to assess the implementation by cycle, identify gaps, and make recommendations. For a treaty that is built on flawed foundations like this PA, such a mechanism will burn funding to assess the implementation of mostly non-binding provisions (those that use wordings such as “consider,” “as appropriate,” etc.) 

As an essentially subsidiary body of the WHO (the WHO will initially provide secretariat support), the COP will then establish its own ‘subsidiary bodies,’ again further expanding and cementing in place another set of international health bureaucracy, all of which will require support.

Article 24. Secretariat

2. Nothing in the WHO Pandemic Agreement shall be interpreted as providing the WHO Secretariat, including the WHO Director-General, any authority to direct, order, alter or otherwise prescribe the national and/or domestic laws, as appropriate, or policies of any Party, or to mandate or otherwise impose any requirements that Parties take specific actions, such as ban or accept travellers, impose vaccination mandates or therapeutic or diagnostic measures or implement lockdowns.

This provision first appeared in the proposed amendments to the IHR, then was duplicated in the PA negotiating process, then was dropped by the IHR. Like the eventual IHR amendments, it gives the WHO soft power but not power to enforce directly. Border closures and other lockdown measures will remain recommendations, but these recommendations, even for theoretical threats, will make it difficult for less powerful countries to not comply.

Notes on other procedural provisions

The WHO will serve as the Secretariat to this PA (Art. 24), The PA allows for reservations to be made (Art. 27). Amendments to the PA may be proposed by any Party (Art. 29.1), and shall be approved by consensus. In case of consensus failure, a three-quarters majority vote of parties present and voting will be needed (Art. 29.3). States parties will notify the Depositary of their acceptance of the adopted amendment; hence, an amendment will enter into force ninety days after the Depositary has received instruments of acceptance from at least two thirds of parties (Art. 29.4). 

Annexes to the PA will follow the same procedure like amendments regarding their entry-into-force (Art. 30.2). However the COP might decide to use another procedure regarding “Annexes of a procedural, scientific or administrative nature” (Art. 30.3). Regional economic organizations may also be party to the PA (Art. 34.1). 

The PA requires 60 ratifications by Member States (plus 30 days) to enter into force (Art. 35.1), which is almost a third of the WHO’s 194 Members. This number is higher than the ratifications commonly required for international treaties. It may reflect a disquiet among Member States about the usefulness of the PA overall. There may therefore be a considerable period between the WHA vote (where a two-thirds majority is likely to be found for an essentially motherhood and meaningless set of statements) and finding sufficient countries to confirm willingness to contribute to further expanding this draining international commercial and bureaucratic agenda. It would be refreshing, though, if this could be recognized as the rather pointless and (in the long term) harmful exercise, and removed from the agenda by a May WHA vote against it.

Commentary on the WHO’s Draft Pandemic Agreement: Pointless Verbiage
by Thi Thuy Van Dinh at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society