The two-year effort to produce a global pandemic treaty failed to meet its deadline.
On Friday, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, announced that the negotiators – from the group’s 194 member nations – couldn’t find consensus in time for the World Health Assembly that starts next week.
The goal had been to draw up a document that could be adopted at the meeting and then sent to countries for ratification. But the sticking points – including the willingness of richer countries to share vaccines and treatments with less well-off countries in the Global South – could not be resolved in time.
Addressing the media after the negotiations broke down, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus insisted that the process was “not a failure.”
REMNANT COMMENT: But we welcome the setback all the same!
