How to kill a pandemic treaty (2024)

GENEVA — At a mountaintop retreat above Lake Geneva in Switzerland in March, a collection of international negotiators gathered under the leadership of a Jordanian prince.

The idea wasn’t just to hammer out details of a diplomatic text, but to talk through the frustrations and grievances that have hampered progress towards drawing up the world’s first pandemic treaty —a noble but ill-fatedattempt to deal with the next pandemic quicker, better, and more equitably than happened with Covid-19.

It was the third such retreat for diplomats since last year, taking place in the middle weekend of the latest round of negotiations. And judging by the state of the talks, this group therapy — courtesy of the International Peace Institute headed by Prince Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein of Jordan — was much needed.

Countries were supposed to emerge last Thursday with a deal for a pandemic treaty that perhaps needed a final polish ahead of the World Health Organization (WHO)'s annual gathering at the end of May.

In reality, it's less than two months until the World Health Assembly (WHA) but countries are not much closer to a deal than they were two years ago.

“We’re now at a very high risk of timing out,”one negotiator from a high-income countryadmitted.

There was hope that simply getting out of the plenary room at the WHO's Geneva headquarters would improve the chances of a deal.

“Deals are not done in plenary,” said the same negotiator who,like others that POLITICO spoke to for this piece, was granted anonymity to talk about confidential discussions. “Everyone has three minutes to put on a show for their capitals. There’s a lot of grandstanding.”

Entrenched positions

The opening session of the latest treaty talks — one of only two open to the public — was taken up with richer countries’ delegates tearing into the latest draft text.

The mood only degenerated from there.

From a vantage point on a mezzanine overlooking the café at the World Health Organization's headquarters, an observer could see the talks unraveling from day to day, as delegates left the negotiating chamber looking a little more dejected each time.

One even hinted to POLITICOhe’d rather be anywhere else than go back in.

Inside the room, talks were stuck. Every day, countries added new language reinforcing their positions on the most controversial issues such as intellectual property, while the draft text swelled toover 100 pages.

“We’re just marking up our disagreements on the screen,” thehigh-income country negotiatortold POLITICO during the talks.

One morning, the sound of applause traveled out of the room, prompting observers waiting outside to wonder whether there had been an improbable breakthrough.

No such luck. The applause was to celebrate that negotiators had finished discussing three articles on pandemic preparedness and were moving on to the next topic.

No agreement was reached; no differences were resolved. Delegates simply recorded their disagreements and were about to spend another week recording some more.

“If you wanted to know how to get a treaty done, you definitely wouldn’t look at this one,” thehigh-income country negotiatorsaid.

Rich vs. poor

When asked, delegatesstruggledto pick a moment when the pandemic treaty became stuck. Rather, negotiations never really began at all.

Countries haverehashed the same argumentsfor nine sessions in a row. Rich countries have never yielded on their demand that any sharing of intellectual property (IP) for products such as vaccines be on voluntary and mutually agreed terms. To developing countries, that approach isn’t much better than doing nothing at all.

Between these two camps lie years of accrued mistrust — over failed talks on IP at the World Trade Organization, over vaccine inequity, over the legacy of imperialism and underdevelopment.

One participant involved in early talks on behalf of a low-income country said a lot of delegates were trained in diplomatic academies and brought “200 years of baggage” with them.

“That’s where you see the real divisions between North and South. Some of the delegates from the South will not even hear a proposal that comes from the EU,” he told POLITICO.

Ellen ‘t Hoen, a health policy expert and observer of the talks from the beginning, thinks the lack of trust weighed so heavily on the negotiators that countries should have started with a kind of peace and reconciliation process.

“The trauma of Covid was still there, countries needed group therapy of some kind," she said. "Representatives from the Global North needed to acknowledge their countries had done wrong."

Layered onto delegates’ fresh memories of the Covid pandemic, historic injustices and a chronic lack of trust between negotiators fromhigher- and lower-incomecountries mean talks at the WHO have been emotionally fraught.

At dinner one evening, a table of delegates from rival camps could be heard vigorously debatinghigher-income countries'actual level of interest in an equitable outcome.

Those representinglower-income countriesbristle at the insinuation that their demands are unrealistic or divisive, given it’s just a few years since they watched richer countries get first dibs on vaccines while Covid ravaged their health systems.

Opening the talks, Precious Matsoso, co-chair of the bureau, the committee overseeing the negotiations, reminded countries that they all agreed equity was important.

“You cannot chicken out now,” she said.

Going nowhere fast

But, according to the attendee from the low-income country, many of the statements made during the ensuing session were so general that they sounded as if they could have been made in 2021.

Two years on, countries are still stuck at the level of principles and what the deal is even supposed to achieve.

“I would have expected maybe one or two rounds of drafting and then you negotiate and own the text. But countries never wanted to take ownership of the text. They kept asking the bureau to bring a new text again and again,” he said.

There has been plenty of criticism from delegates and observers towards the officials running the talks, but James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International, says the real problem is political.

"If you’re trying to get an agreement and people don’t agree, there’s only so much you can do. The same people [in the U.S. and Europe] who were singing Kumbaya in 2020 are now saying something else in the negotiations," he said.

Delegates are resigned to another session at the end of April where they will try and agree on something to bring to the WHA. It would be hard to find any negotiator who is looking forward to it.