Lawrence Gostin

Lawrence Gostin is the founding O'Neill Chair in Global Health Law at Georgetown University and Director of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, the world's foremost centre for legal scholarship on public health emergencies. He served as senior adviser to the WHO Director-General and co-edits The Lancet Commission on global health law, making him the pre-eminent voice on what international legal architecture should govern health crises.

Gostin's career spans four decades of translating public health imperatives into binding legal instruments. He led the drafting process that shaped the WHO International Health Regulations revision and has consistently argued that voluntary frameworks produce inequitable outcomes: wealthy nations hoard vaccines, poorer nations receive surplus. His major works, including Public Health Law and Global Health Law, are standard texts in health-policy curricula worldwide.

On the WHO Pandemic Agreement, Gostin occupies the most prominent pro-binding position in academic circles. He contends that the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) annex is not an optional ADD-on but the operational mechanism that converts the treaty's equity commitments into enforceable reality. Without it, signatories can invoke the Agreement's spirit while reproducing the COVID-era failures of vaccine nationalism.

In the negotiations over the WHO Pandemic Agreement, Gostin emerged as the leading academic advocate for a treaty with teeth. He argued publicly that the PABS annex represents the Agreement's only mechanism for ensuring low-income countries receive actual access to vaccines and diagnostics in the next outbreak, not pledges. His position: any agreement that leaves PABS unresolved is a diplomatic document, not a public health instrument. He has also warned that the current H5N1 surveillance gap in US dairy herds demonstrates precisely why binding international surveillance obligations matter, the voluntary approach produces blind spots with pandemic potential.