Global elites urged to finalize WHO Pandemic Agreement’s Pathogen Access annex amid structural inequities in pandemic preparedness and response
Original framing: “Open letter to leaders of G7, G20, BRICS and all nations on finalizing the WHO Pandemic Agreement’s Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing annex” — WHO News
The PABS annex risks entrenching a future where Northern institutions control pathogen data while Southern populations bear the brunt of pandemics, exacerbating global health inequities. Scenario modeling suggests that without radical reform, the agreement could lead to a two-tiered system where the Global North secures vaccines through bilateral deals while the South remains dependent on charity. Alternative futures, such as decentralized, community-led surveillance networks, could offer more equitable and resilient models of pandemic preparedness.
The WHO’s Pandemic Agreement, as framed in the open letter, exemplifies how global health governance reproduces colonial extractivism under the guise of equity, treating pathogens as commodities to be controlled by Northern institutions while externalizing the costs of pandemic preparedness to the Global South.
This technocratic approach ignores the historical debt of Northern powers, the relational epistemologies of Indigenous and African traditions, and the ecological drivers of zoonotic spillover, instead entrenching a two-tiered system where the North secures vaccines through bilateral deals while the South remains dependent on charity. The agreement’s focus on benefit-sharing mechanisms—modeled after colonial-era data extraction—masks the deeper failure to address the structural inequities that make pandemics inevitable. True pandemic resilience requires decolonizing data governance, centering reparative justice, and integrating Indigenous and ecological knowledge into a holistic, community-led framework. Without these shifts, the PABS annex will merely replicate the vaccine apartheid and data colonialism that defined the COVID-19 response, ensuring that the next pandemic will be met with the same inequities and suffering.