The member states of the WHO (World Health Organization) agreed this Wednesday (1) to launch a negotiating table to formulate an international treaty aimed at controlling future pandemics. The agreement to strengthen mitigation measures for health crises should be ready in May 2024.
The legal nature of the document, however, was already a matter of disagreement. While the European Union (EU) and 70 other nations pushed for a binding agreement — with the countries being obliged to follow what is decided within its scope —, members like Brazil, USA and India, some of the most affected by the pandemic, they were reluctant to commit, according to reports by diplomats to Reuters.
Ambassador Lotte Knudsen, head of the EU delegation in Geneva, argued in a statement that the document needs to be ambitious, which can only be demonstrated through a multilateral commitment and a legally binding instrument.
The US, world leaders in absolute numbers of Covid deaths, welcomed the decision, saying it was an important step in collective responsibility to make the global health system stronger and more agile. Australia, through ambassador Sally Mansfield, who co-chaired the working group on the subject, said that the text was the product of commitments and frank discussions.
While the treaty resulting from the decision dubbed “The World Together” is not finalized, the 194 Member States of WHO must respect the International Health Regulations, a document approved in 2005 which, among other points, obliges countries to feed a health information system to shorten the response time in an emergency.
According to the schedule published by WHO, the intergovernmental negotiating body chosen to draft the agreement will hold its first meeting in March 2022, with the aim of establishing working procedures and deadlines. Six months later, the second meeting will discuss the progress of the work. Hearings will be held, and a report must be delivered to the World Health Assembly in 2023. The result, finally, will be taken to the body in 2024.
The Director General of WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, congratulated the member countries and said that the important thing, in the next steps, is to overcome differences. “It is clear that there is still a long way to go, with differences over what a new agreement can or should contain.”
“Last week, this virus has demonstrated that it will not just disappear,” followed the Ethiopian, referring to the identification of the omicron variant. “How many lives will still be lost and what livelihoods to face it are questions that are up to us.”
Approval of the initiative for the new international treaty on pandemics had been underway for months —governments such as German Prime Minister Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron presented a similar proposal in March—but the emergence of omicron has had an effect. final push.
The new, potentially more transmissible strain was sequenced across South Africa last week and has already spread across five continents. Nigerian health authorities said on Wednesday that the first cases of omicron were confirmed in the country. One of the samples with the strain, however, is from October, which suggests that the variant was already in circulation before it was formally identified by the scientists.
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