COUNTRIES failed to find a breakthrough after a seventh round of talks aimed at finalizing the missing piece of a pandemic treaty, the World Health Organization said on Monday. Wealthy countries and developing nations are at loggerheads over how the agreement, adopted last year as a framework to handle future Covid-like pandemics, will work in practice.
Though the treaty was agreed in May 2025, how its key mechanism would operate was left out to get the deal over the line. The agreement’s Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS) system covers how to share access to pathogens with pandemic potential, then sharing benefits derived from them such as vaccines, tests and treatments.
It was meant to be finalized by May 2026, but progress has been agonizingly slow, and another two weeks of talks at the WHO headquarters in Geneva wrapped up on Friday having produced only some incremental progress. The eighth round of talks will be held from 14 to 18 September. WHO member states “advanced negotiations” on the PABS annex, “while agreeing that continued discussions are needed to finalize a framework that supports a faster, more effective and equitable response to future pandemics”, the UN health agency said in a statement.
The talks streamlined the draft text and focused on technical aspects like the contracts underpinning the framework, the laboratory networks responsible for handling and sharing pathogens and their sequences, and the definition of benefits arising from pathogen sharing, the WHO said.
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