WHO countries strike landmark agreement on tackling future pandemics
Years of negotiations culminated early Wednesday with countries agreeing the text of a landmark accord on how to tackle future pandemics, aimed at avoiding the mistakes made during the Covid-19 crisis.
After more than three years of talks and one last marathon session, weary delegates at the World Health Organization's headquarters finally sealed the deal at around 2:00 am (0000 GMT) Wednesday.
"Tonight marks a significant milestone in our shared journey towards a safer world," said WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
"The nations of the world made history in Geneva today."
Five years after the emergence of Covid-19, which killed millions of people, devastated economies and upturned health systems, a sense of urgency hung over the talks, with new threats lurking -- including H5N1 bird flu, measles, mpox and Ebola.
The final stretch of the talks also took place under the shadow of cuts to US foreign aid spending and threatened tariffs on pharmaceuticals.
- 'It's adopted' -
Right until the last minute, disagreement lingered over a few thorny issues.
Negotiators stumbled over the agreement's Article 11, which deals with transferring technology for pandemic health products towards developing nations.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, poorer states accused rich nations of hoarding vaccines and tests.
Countries with large pharmaceutical industries have strenuously opposed the idea of mandatory tech transfers, insisting they must be voluntary.
But it appeared the obstacle could be overcome by adding that any transfer needed to be "mutually agreed".
The core of the agreement is a proposed Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing System (PABS), aimed at allowing the swift sharing of pathogen data with pharmaceutical companies, enabling them to quickly start working on pandemic-fighting products.
In the end, the 32-page agreement was entirely highlighted in green, indicating all of it had been fully approved by WHO member states.
"It's adopted," negotiations co-chair Anne-Claire Amprou announced, to thunderous applause.
"In drafting this historic agreement, the countries of the world have demonstrated their shared commitment to preventing and protecting everyone, everywhere, from future pandemic threats."
The finalised text will now be presented for sign-off at the WHO's annual assembly next month.
- 'More equity' -
As intense talks in corridors and closed rooms drew towards an end late on Tuesday, Tedros told reporters he thought the draft was "balanced", and that a deal would bring "more equity".
While taking measures to coordinate pandemic prevention, preparedness and response could be costly, "the cost of inaction is much bigger", he insisted.
"Virus is the worst enemy. (It) could be worse than a war."
The United States, which has thrown the global health system into crisis by slashing foreign aid spending, was absent.
US President Donald Trump ordered a withdrawal from the United Nations' health agency and from the pandemic agreement talks after taking office in January.
However, the US absence, and Trump's threat to slap steep tariffs on pharmaceutical products, still hung over the talks, making manufacturers and governments more jittery.
But in the end, countries reached consensus.
- 'Real work begins now' -
Looking ahead towards implementation, the leading pharma lobby said intellectual property and legal certainty would be essential if the industry was to invest in high-risk research and development in the next crisis.
"The pandemic agreement is a starting point," said David Reddy, director general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, which participated in the talks.
"We hope that in subsequent negotiations, member states maintain the conditions for the private sector to continue innovating against pathogens of pandemic potential."
Many saw the approval of the text as a victory for global cooperation.
"At a time when multilateralism is under threat, WHO member states have joined together to say that we will defeat the next pandemic threat in the only way possible: by working together," said New Zealand's former prime minister Helen Clark, co-chair of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response.
As the congratulatory speeches continued on towards daybreak at the WHO HQ, Eswatini's representative cautioned that "whilst we celebrate this moment, we need not rest on our laurels.
"The real work begins now."
apo-nl/rjm/jj
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Chicago Tribune
39 minutes ago
- Chicago Tribune
Used in COVID shots, mRNA may help rid the body of HIV
The technology that powered COVID vaccines may also lead scientists to a cure for HIV. Using mRNA, Australian researchers said they were able to trick the virus to come out of hiding, a crucial step in ridding the body of it entirely. The research, published last week in Nature Communications, is still preliminary and so far has been shown to be successful only in a lab. But it suggests that mRNA has potential far beyond its use in vaccines as a means to deliver therapies against stubborn adversaries. Short for messenger RNA, mRNA is a set of instructions for a gene. In the case of COVID vaccines, the instructions were for a piece of the coronavirus. In the new study, they are for molecules key to targeting HIV. Dr. Sharon Lewin, director of the Doherty Institute at the University of Melbourne, who led the study, called mRNA a 'miraculous' tool 'to deliver things that you want into places that were not possible before.' Vaccines deploying mRNA instruct the body to produce a fragment of the virus, which then sets off the body's immune response. In the United States, the shots were initially hailed for turning back the pandemic, then viewed by some with suspicion and fear. Some officials, including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have falsely said that they are highly dangerous and even deadly. Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services sought to limit the vaccine's availability to pregnant women, children and healthy younger adults. The administration also canceled a nearly $600 million contract with the drugmaker Moderna to develop an mRNA shot for humans against bird flu. 'The fear right now is not rational,' Lewin said, adding that 'mRNA vaccines have been given to millions of people around the world, so we have a very good understanding of their risks.' The new study describes the use of mRNA as a tool to flush HIV out of its hiding places. Other uses could involve providing proteins missing from those with certain diseases or correcting genetic errors. Frauke Muecksch, a virologist at Heidelberg University in Germany who was not involved in the work, called mRNA a 'promising, absolutely powerful technology.' Although most people may have only heard of mRNA's use in science during the pandemic, scientists have been working with it for more than 20 years, she said. 'I think it's not just therapeutically very powerful, but also for basic science, for research, it opens up a lot of avenues,' she added. Potent antiretroviral drugs can now control HIV, suppressing it to undetectable levels. Still, minute amounts of the virus lie dormant in so-called reservoirs, waiting for an opportunity to resurge. A cure for HIV would involve ferreting out all of this virus and destroying it, a strategy that has been called 'shock and kill.' A significant hurdle is that the virus lies dormant in a particular type of immune cell, called a resting CD4 cell. Because these cells are inactive, they tend to be unresponsive to drugs. The few drugs scientists have previously used to rouse the virus in these cells were not specific to HIV and had unwanted side effects. 'It's fair to say the field's been a little bit stuck,' said Brad Jones, a viral immunologist at Weill Cornell Medicine who was not involved in the latest research. In 2022, Jones and his colleagues found that the immune boost from the mRNA vaccines awakened latent HIV in people living with the virus. (Other research has shown that mRNA vaccines also activated dormant viruses including Epstein Barr.) 'You get just a little bit of a gentle nudge with some of these vaccines, and it's enough to coax some of these latent viruses out so they can be killed,' Jones said. Lewin and her colleagues had for years experimented with other ways to activate HIV but had no luck in resting cells. Seeing the success of the COVID vaccines, which used lipid nanoparticles — tiny spheres of fat — containing mRNA, her team tested similar particles. They used the particles to deliver two different sets of molecules: Tat, which is adept at switching HIV on, and CRISPR, a tool that can 'edit' genes. The researchers showed that in resting immune cells from people living with HIV, the approach coaxed the virus out of dormancy. 'It's very, very hard to deal with these cells, so I think this really targeting the right population of cells is what makes this paper special,' Muecksch said. It's unclear whether the new approach can successfully awaken all of the dormant HIV in the body, and what side effects it might produce. Lewin said that 'mRNA will almost certainly have some adverse effects, as every drug does, but we will investigate that systematically, as we do for any new drug.' In this case, she said, side effects may be more acceptable to people living with HIV than having to take medications for the rest of their lives. The researchers plan to test the method in HIV-infected animals next, before moving into clinical trials. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Yahoo
39 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Several Psychiatric Disorders Share The Same Root Cause, Study Finds
Researchers recently discovered that eight different psychiatric conditions share a common genetic basis. A study published this year pinpointed specific variants among those shared genes and uncovered how they behave during brain development. The US team found that many of these variants remain active for extended periods, potentially influencing multiple developmental stages – and offering new targets for treatments that could address several disorders at once. "The proteins produced by these genes are also highly connected to other proteins," explains University of North Carolina geneticist Hyejung Won. "Changes to these proteins in particular could ripple through the network, potentially causing widespread effects on the brain." In 2019 an international team of researchers first identified 109 genes that were linked in different combinations with eight psychiatric disorders, including autism, ADHD, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, Tourette syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and anorexia. This may explain why these conditions often co-occur – for example up to 70 percent of individuals diagnosed with autism or ADHD have the other too – and why they frequently cluster in families. Each of these eight conditions also has gene differences that are unique to them individually, so Won and team compared the unique genes with those shared between the disorders. They took almost 18,000 variations of the shared and unique genes involved and put them into the precursor cells that become our neurons to see how they could impact gene expression in these cells during human development. This allowed the researchers to identify 683 genetic variants that impacted gene regulation and to further explore them in neurons from developing mice. Genetic variants behind multiple seemingly unrelated traits, or in this case conditions, are called pleiotropic. The pleiotropic variants were involved in many more protein-to-protein interactions than the gene variants unique to specific psychological conditions, and they were active across more types of brain cells. Pleiotropic variants were also involved in regulatory mechanisms that impact multiple stages of brain development. The ability of these genes to impact cascades and networks of processes, such as gene regulation, could explain why the same variants can contribute to different conditions. "Pleiotropy was traditionally viewed as a challenge because it complicates the classification of psychiatric disorders," says Won. "However, if we can understand the genetic basis of pleiotropy, it might allow us to develop treatments targeting these shared genetic factors, which could then help treat multiple psychiatric disorders with a common therapy." This would be a very useful strategy given the World Health Organization estimates 1 in 8 people (almost 1 billion in total) live with some form of psychiatric condition. This research was published in Cell. An earlier version of this article was first published in February 2025. New Smart Dental Floss Can Detect Your Stress From Saliva Gluten Intolerance vs Celiac Disease: Experts Reveal The Key Differences Weight-Loss Drugs Like Ozempic Can Leave Lasting Damage in Your Mouth
Yahoo
39 minutes ago
- Yahoo
US health secretary dismisses entire vaccine advisory panel
US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday announced he was dismissing all members of a key federal vaccine advisory panel, accusing its members of conflicts of interest -- his latest salvo against the nation's immunization policies. The decision to remove all 17 experts of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) was unveiled in a Wall Street Journal op-ed and an official press release. Kennedy cast the overhaul as essential to rebuilding public trust, accusing the panel of being compromised by financial ties to pharmaceutical companies. "Today we are prioritizing the restoration of public trust above any specific pro- or anti-vaccine agenda," he said in the statement from the Department of Health and Human Services. "The public must know that unbiased science -- evaluated through a transparent process and insulated from conflicts of interest -- guides the recommendations of our health agencies." In his op-ed, Kennedy claimed the panel had been "plagued with persistent conflicts of interest" and had become "little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine." He said new members were being considered to replace the outgoing experts, who had been appointed for their recognized expertise and were required to submit conflict-of-interest disclosures. Kennedy has spent the past two decades promoting vaccine misinformation, including the widely debunked claim that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) shot causes autism. Since taking office, he has curtailed access to Covid-19 vaccines and continued to sow doubts about the MMR shot -- even as the United States experiences its worst measles outbreak in years, with three reported deaths and more than 1,100 cases. Experts warn the number of official cases may vastly understate the true toll of the measles outbreak. ia/aha
