Pandemic preparedness and response shall remain a high priority for the global health community. While talks at WHO on a pandemic instrument have progressed in some areas, including on research and development and on sustainable financing, negotiations have reached an impasse over several other key/critical measures to make access to pandemic-related health products more equitable.

Whereas world leaders emphasized in 2020 that nobody is safe until everyone is safe, regrettably, some now appear to give primacy to industrial and trade goals at the expense of health while rejecting a multilateral and collegiate approach.

The transfer of technology is a key recourse to scale production and enable access to more affordable products. It can involve a variety of measures, particularly for complex medicines with challenging regulatory pathways. In some cases authorizations to use patented inventions are a possible intervention. Others would address access to necessary know-how and materials used in manufacturing, such as working cell lines, or right to access and rely upon information from regulatory filings. Voluntary agreements are important, but when not available or adequate, WHO members need to have legal and policy space to regulate or use other measures of a mandatory nature.

There are some useful and important provisions in the current negotiating text on transparency, but these fall short of the norms set out in the 2019 WHA resolution on transparency, WHA72.8 which WHO member states committed to adopt and implement.

Transparency is also important for the negotiations themselves. We are pleased that the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) has decided, in the late stages of negotiation, to release a version of the negotiating text each day, and to permit the daily NGO statements/delivered statements to be webcasted. But this should be the case for the entire plenary sessions. There are many well known benefits from making negotiations more transparent as is the case in other intergovernmental organizations. By following the debates the public will better understand what the agreement will do, or not do, and why. Excessive secrecy of the negotiations themselves contributes to the spread of false narratives and regrettable and harmful mistrust of the WHO.