World Health Organization (WHO) member countries adopted a new treaty on May 20, 2025, to improve international coordination and cooperation on the prevention of, preparation for, and response to future pandemics, Human Rights Watch said today.
While its entry into force would mark improvement over the status quo, the WHO Pandemic Agreement provides little support to ensure its effective implementation, containing neither an enforcement mechanism nor concrete funding obligations. The vote also largely defers addressing one of the foundational drivers of the Covid-19 pandemic's devastating human rights impact on less wealthy countries: the inequitable distribution of vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics.
"With ongoing disease outbreaks and inevitable future pandemics, the treaty is a much needed step in the right direction, but getting to yes meant kicking some important cans down the road," said Matt McConnell, economic justice and rights researcher at Human Rights Watch. "It's an important foundation, but now isn't the time to rest on our laurels. Whether this agreement can live up to its promise will depend on whether governments live up to theirs."
The agreement has the potential to reduce rising global health inequalities as well as the likelihood, and human rights impacts of, the next pandemic, Human Rights Watch said. However, it still falls far short of addressing the scope and scale of human rights violations that occurred during and because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The treaty will enter into force when at least 60 governments ratify it and will open for signatures from governments after the conclusion of another round of negotiations planned for the coming year.
More than five years after the WHO declared Covid-19 a pandemic, more than 7 million deaths have been reported, and the harm caused by both the virus and governments' responses to it will be felt for decades to come.
During the pandemic, wealthy governments hoarded healthcare resources and privileged private profit over people's lives by blocking efforts to waive intellectual property rules that would have helped expand and diversify production of Covid-19 health products, including vaccines. Pharmaceutical companies also refused to share their technology widely, limiting global production of lifesaving health products, especially in low- and middle-income countries.
The treaty adopted by the WHO World Health Assembly is the result of more than three years of contentious negotiations that began with the goal of preventing this harm from happening again during the next pandemic by crafting an international agreement to ensure more equitable access to vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics.
It was only the second legally binding international agreement negotiated by WHO member countries. It is a significant feat of international cooperation, completed despite numerous threats to international institutions like the WHO, Human Rights Watch said.
The United States' recent withdrawal from the WHO, in particular, upended treaty negotiations and triggered an acute financial crisis and shakeup within the institution. While representatives of world governments voted to adopt the treaty, US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. encouraged other governments to abandon the 77-year-old United Nations agency.
The treaty outlines governments' commitments to improving domestic and international policies on a wide range of interrelated issues. They include preventing the transmission of diseases from animals to humans; attaching public interest conditions to public funding for pharmaceutical research and development; and sharing technologies and expertise required for the production of pandemic-related health goods. They also include promoting the local and regional production of such goods, as well as their equitable global distribution, and financing robust healthcare systems and work forces.
The further negotiations over the coming year will focus on drafting an annex to the treaty that will attempt to resolve outstanding questions regarding one of the most contentious issues during negotiations: the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) System.
The PABS System will serve as a framework to help make sharing information and data regarding pathogens with pandemic potential, such as genomic sequences of viruses, more rapid, systemic, and timely. Vital scientific information is often collected in, and by researchers from, countries that have been largely excluded from the benefits of this research, such as vaccines derived from the data. The treaty's proposed PABS System would attempt to address this by coupling commitments to share this information with commitments to more equitably distribute healthcare goods derived from it.
Under the new agreement, pharmaceutical manufacturers that participate in the PABS System will gain access to such information in exchange for a commitment to provide the WHO with 20 percent of their production of vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics for any pathogen that causes a pandemic emergency. In turn, the WHO will distribute these healthcare goods to low- and middle-income countries in an equitable manner. How this PABS System will function in practice, however, was left unresolved by negotiators, and will be left to these future negotiations.
While the treaty will be legally binding on all governments that ratify it, the commitments contained within it are largely voluntary and have significant caveats. The agreement also contains major omissions that may hinder its impact, including the absence of an accountability mechanism and specific commitments to provide financial support for its implementation.
Even the proposed PABS System, which would be a radical improvement over the status quo, has faced criticism as inadequate. In a 2024 statement, the Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, described the proposed commitment to ensure that 20 percent of healthcare goods are made available to low- and middle-income countries as "shameful, unjust, and inequitable."
Despite these concerns, the agreement provides a framework that governments should build upon. Member country representatives participating in negotiations on the planned annex should ensure that it is fully consistent with their domestic and international human rights obligations, including the adequate regulation of businesses involved in the production of healthcare goods and the meaningful pursuit of international cooperation toward economic, social, and cultural rights and the right to health in particular.
All governments should similarly rely on international human rights law as a framework to help guide their implementation of the agreement, Human Rights Watch said. In particular, all parties should examine and ensure that steps taken in accordance with its terms adequately reflect existing domestic and international obligations to respect, protect, and fulfill all human rights.
"The agreement's lip service to equity is largely undermined by its failures to grapple with what caused Covid-19 to harm certain communities and certain countries more than others," McConnell said. "We shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, but far stronger commitments are needed, especially from Global North countries, to avoid repeating our mistakes."
