{"id":27640,"date":"2024-05-25T05:30:07","date_gmt":"2024-05-25T10:30:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=27640"},"modified":"2024-05-25T05:30:15","modified_gmt":"2024-05-25T10:30:15","slug":"efforts-to-draft-a-pandemic-treaty-falter-as-countries-disagree-on-how-to-respond-to-next-emergency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=27640","title":{"rendered":"Efforts to draft a pandemic treaty falter as countries disagree on how to respond to next emergency"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

GENEVA — A global treaty to fight pandemics like COVID is going to have to wait: After more than two years of negotiations, rich and poor countries have failed \u2014 for now \u2014 to come up with a plan for how the world might respond to the next pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After COVID-19 triggered once-unthinkable lockdowns, upended economies and killed millions, leaders at the World Health Organization and worldwide vowed to do better in the future. In 2021, member countries asked the U.N. health agency to oversee negotiations to figure out how the world might better share scarce resources and stop future viruses from spreading globally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Friday, Roland Driece, co-chair of WHO\u2019s negotiating board for the agreement, acknowledged that countries were unable to come up with a draft. WHO had hoped a final draft treaty could be agreed on at its yearly meeting of health ministers starting Monday in Geneva.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe are not where we hoped we would be when we started this process,” he said, adding that finalizing an international agreement on how to respond to a pandemic was critical \u201cfor the sake of humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Driece said the World Health Assembly next week would take up lessons from its work and plot the way forward, urging participants to make “the right decisions to take this process forward\u201d to one day reach a pandemic agreement “because we need it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The draft treaty had attempted to address the gap that occurred between COVID-19 vaccines<\/a> in rich and poorer countries, which WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said amounted to \u201ca catastrophic moral failure.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Addressing a sullen final day of negotiations, the WHO chief insisted, \u201cThis is not a failure.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe will try everything \u2014 believing that anything is possible \u2014 and make this happen because the world still needs a pandemic treaty,” he said. “Because many of the challenges that caused a serious impact during COVID-19 still exist.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The accord\u2019s aim was to set guidelines for how the WHO\u2019s 194 member countries might stop future pandemics and better share resources. But experts warned there were virtually no consequences for countries that don\u2019t comply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The co-chairs of the treaty-drafting process didn’t specify what caused the logjam, but diplomats have said vast differences remained over sharing of information about pathogens that emerge and the sharing of technologies to fight them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The latest draft had proposed that WHO should get 20% of the production of pandemic-related products like tests, treatments and vaccines and urges countries to disclose their deals with private companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Earlier this month, U.S. Republican senators wrote to the Biden administration, arguing that the draft treaty focused on issues like \u201cshredding intellectual property rights\u201d and \u201csupercharging the WHO.\u201d They urged Biden not to sign off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Britain\u2019s department of health said it would only agree to an accord if it adhered to British national interest and sovereignty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, many developing countries said it\u2019s unfair that they might be expected to provide virus samples to help develop vaccines and treatments, but then be unable to afford them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Precious Matsoso, the other co-chair of WHO’s negotiating board for the pandemic treaty, said there was still an opportunity to reach agreement and that efforts wouldn’t stop \u2014 despite the inability to reach a deal on Friday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe will make sure that this happens, because when the next pandemic hits, it will not spare us,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tedros, the WHO chief, said there should be no regrets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat matters now is when do we learn from this and how can we reset things, recalibrate things, identify the main challenges, and then move on,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

abcnews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

GENEVA — A global treaty to fight pandemics like COVID is going to have to wait: After more than two years of negotiations, rich and poor countries have failed \u2014 for now \u2014 to come up with a plan for how the world might respond to the next pandemic. After COVID-19 triggered once-unthinkable lockdowns, upended economies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":27641,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5784],"tags":[1781,5124,28590,9294,1743,28588,9593,28591,28589],"class_list":["post-27640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health","tag-countries","tag-disagreement","tag-drafting","tag-efforts","tag-emergency","tag-epidemic-treaty","tag-existence","tag-how-to-respond","tag-next-time"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27640"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27642,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27640\/revisions\/27642"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/27641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}