6 July 2026
Geneva
Today, the WHO began another round of negotiations on the pandemic agreement. For some time, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) has taken the position that equity provisions should not be linked to access to PABS materials or data, that governments joining the treaty should be responsible for enforcing the access/equity provisions, and that those provisions should be triggered by the registration and sale of products, not access to information.
At the morning session of the Seventh meeting of the open-ended Intergovernmental Working Group on the WHO Pandemic Agreement (resolution WHA78.1), KEI delivered the following statement recommending the following text for a PABS Annex.
Annex [X]: Implementation of Market Access and Product Allocation
Paragraph 1: Scope and Market Access Requirement
Each Party shall take all necessary legal, administrative, or regulatory measures to ensure that any manufacturer seeking to register or sell pandemic-related products within its jurisdiction provides verifiable evidence of a legally binding agreement with the World Health Organization (WHO) that addresses access to such products, consistent with Article 12, Paragraph 6, of the Pandemic Agreement.
Paragraph 2: Specific Pathogen and Field of Use Alignment
The obligations outlined in this Annex shall apply exclusively to products used within the specific field of use and indication required to address the specific pathogen being shared under the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS) System. This obligation shall not extend to other uses or indications of the same products. It remains strictly binding on the manufacturer regardless of whether that individual manufacturer utilized materials or digital sequence information (DSI) from the PABS System for its development or production.