May 20, 2025
The O’Neill Institute issued the following statement from Dr. Matthew M. Kavanagh, director of the Center for Global Health Policy and Politics, in response to Member States of the WHO formally adopting the world’s first Pandemic Agreement.
“Passage of the Pandemic Agreement by the world’s ministers of health today is remarkable in a geopolitical context in which competition and acrimony dominate.
The Pandemic Agreement will create important new international law on how the world will manage the pandemics that will unquestionably come in the years ahead. It gives new clarity to declarations of pandemic emergency and creates a framework for sharing technology during those emergencies to try to avoid the kind of inequality in access to medicines and vaccines seen in COVID, AIDS, Ebola, and other recent pandemics. Those inequalities prolonged and fueled the pandemics and preventing them will be crucial to stopping the pandemics to come. Unfortunately, rich countries watered down key elements of the agreement, making the sharing of vaccines and medicines, and the technology to produce them, more a suggestion than a requirement, so it’s not fully clear whether this new international law will have impact. That will be decided in how it’s implemented.
The United States did not show up for the final negotiations but it turns out the United States is not indispensable and, in fact, perhaps not having the United States engaged is what enabled more cooperation. With the current administration seemingly intent on dismantling global public health efforts, this may be the best-case scenario if the rest of the world can come together.
In that way, this new agreement is a spot of light in an otherwise dark geopolitical environment for fighting pandemics.”