Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing

Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS) is the annex to the WHO Pandemic Agreement that would establish legally binding rules for two interlinked obligations: pathogen sharing (the obligation of member states to rapidly share pathogen samples and sequence data with WHO and the global research community during a pandemic emergency) and benefit-sharing (the obligation of vaccine and pharmaceutical manufacturers that use those samples to return a share of resulting medical countermeasures to the countries that provided the pathogens, particularly lower-income countries). The logic is a negotiated exchange: you share the virus, you get access to the tools it makes possible.

PABS has been the central fault line in WHO Pandemic Agreement negotiations since the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) process began in 2022. High-income countries and pharmaceutical industry voices have sought non-binding commitments and market-based distribution mechanisms; lower-income countries, led by the African Group, have insisted on mandatory dose-sharing, technology transfer, and intellectual property waiver as the price of rapid sample-sharing. The predecessor WHO PIP Framework (2011), triggered by H1N1, established a voluntary model for influenza that lower-income countries regard as having failed them during COVID-19.

The 79th World Health Assembly (May 2026) formally deferred PABS adoption to WHA80 in May 2027, with IGWG7 scheduled for 6-17 July 2026 as the next attempt . The Bundibugyo outbreak has turned PABS from an abstract negotiation into a live test case: DRC is sharing Bundibugyo sequence data in real time under existing mechanisms, but with no treaty-guaranteed right to the vaccines CEPI is now funding with $62 million . The WHO Pandemic Agreement cannot enter into force under Article 31(2) until PABS is adopted; one year after the Agreement's WHA78 adoption, no country has signed .

IGWG7, the seventh Intergovernmental Working Group session on the WHO Pandemic Agreement, closed in Geneva on 17 July 2026 with no agreed annex text, the fourth deferral in the process. It missed the Deadline Brazilian President Lula and WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had set as "a Deadline, not a milestone" in a 15 June open letter to the G7, G20 and BRICS, the first time a head of state had put his name to the PABS push.

The session made the substantive dispute concrete: the Africa Group, represented by Algeria, backed a federated model of distributed national and regional laboratories under binding conditionalities, while the European Union and other industrialised states backed a hybrid model built on more centralised infrastructure and looser access conditions. Algeria told the session the federated approach "offers a more balanced and sustainable approach than models that rely on centralised infrastructures, dilute access conditionalities, or leave open parallel channels that may perpetuate the status quo that failed during COVID-19." Knowledge Ecology International published proposed annex text on 6 July arguing benefit-sharing should attach to a product's market registration rather than to whether shared materials or sequence data were used. Co-chairs Ambassador Tovar da Silva Nunes (Brazil) and Matthew Harpur will reconvene the group as IGWG8 in Geneva on 14-18 September 2026; formal adoption remains targeted for WHA80 in May 2027.