Universal access to measures that diagnose, treat and prevent communicable diseases has always been important for public health, for obvious reasons. That said, society often struggles to make these countermeasures both affordable and available in a timely manner. The WHO needs to re-engage on the topic of reforming incentives to both invest in biomedical R&D and to provide for the transfer of manufacturing technology, when needed. It’s not enough to embrace platitudes on universal access without confronting the need to make policies that are fit for universal access, including policies on incentives to invest in R&D and, when needed, to transfer manufacturing technology.