What changed
WHO leaders are urging countries to adopt a political declaration on pandemic prevention and to finish negotiating a pathogen access and benefit-sharing system. The push follows the adoption of amendments to the International Health Regulations in 2024 and the WHO Pandemic Agreement in 2025, but neither the declaration nor the agreement’s ratification and entry into force is settled.
Why it matters
The machinery for the next outbreak is being assembled while familiar alarms are still ringing. WHO points to ongoing Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and a hantavirus outbreak aboard the MV Hondius that was controlled through international cooperation, arguing that an outbreak can begin locally and quickly become a wider problem.
The stakes are hard to miss. COVID-19 killed at least 20 million people and erased more than $10 trillion from the global economy, according to WHO. Its lesson is practical: pandemic preparation is less about predicting the next pathogen than making sure countries can detect, share information about and respond to one before local disruption becomes global damage.
WHO says 12 initiatives now support that work across six areas, including the Pandemic Fund with the World Bank, the Berlin-based Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence, COVAX, the mRNA Technology Transfer Programme in South Africa and the Global Health Emergency Corps. The remaining access-and-benefit-sharing negotiations matter because countries are still trying to agree how pathogen samples and the benefits derived from them should be handled.
The sensible reading is that the framework is further along than it was during COVID-19, but still incomplete. If countries adopt the declaration and resolve the outstanding negotiations, the Pandemic Agreement can move toward ratification; if they do not, the system remains a collection of initiatives and promises rather than a fully operating international framework.
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