World Health Organization to begin negotiating international pandemic treaty
Luke Taylor
Abstract
World Health Organization states agreed on 1 December to begin negotiating an international agreement on how countries must prevent, prepare for, and react to pandemics. The decision was made by WHO’s 194 member states, who convened in Geneva for the second ever special session of the World Health Assembly, and what senior WHO officials said was an inflection point in international public health. The agreement is “a cause for celebration and cause for hope, which we will need,” said WHO’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “Let it be said, decades from now when each of us is nothing more than photographs and memories, that we left the world a healthier, safer, fairer place than we found it.” Member states have agreed to a timeline which could lead to a legally binding treaty tackling the global inequities and …