As the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) meetings for a Pandemic Agreement resume, Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) urges World Health Organization (WHO) member states to recall lessons learned from past health emergencies, build on the progress made in previous negotiations, and commit to stronger obligations on remaining issues. These include ensuring access to humanitarian assistance during health emergencies according to international humanitarian law; ensuring transparency and transfer of technologies and know-how; linking public funding for research and development (R&D) and communities’ contributions to clinical trials with the requirement to ensure access to medical products; collaborating on production, supply, stockpiling and allocation efforts; and establishing a global mechanism for pathogen access and benefit sharing.
We welcome the proposals under Paragraph 10 and 11 of the draft workplan to improve participation of relevant stakeholders. New measures allowing relevant stakeholders to both receive the negotiation text and observe closed and drafting group sessions can improve transparency of the negotiation. The negotiation text should be distributed not only after the full INB meeting, but at periodic intervals during the negotiations to ensure stakeholders’ comments are more timely and effective. Regular briefings and thematic sessions with member states should be retained as good practices, and the word limit on stakeholders’ written comments should be expanded.
We welcome Paragraph 6 on better prioritisation of remaining issues. To this end, member states should agree not to reopen greened text and to allocate sufficient time for key equity-related provisions that could not be scheduled effectively for negotiation in the last INB meeting, such as R&D provisions under Article 9, and language concerning transfer of technologies and know-how and intellectual property under Article 11.
MSF remains committed to supporting the negotiation and will continue to share our comments with the INB.
