Suerie Moon

Suerie Moon is Co-director of the Global Health Centre at the Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID) and one of the world's leading scholars on the political economy of pandemic preparedness. Trained in international relations and global health at Harvard, she previously directed research at the Harvard Global Health Institute before moving to Geneva, placing her at the intersection of WHO negotiations, academic analysis, and advocacy on equitable access to health technologies.

Moon's scholarly focus is the structural tension between intellectual property regimes and public health necessity. She has produced landmark analyses of how TRIPS flexibilities have been used and abused during health emergencies, and her work on the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT-A) Accelerator documented the limits of voluntary burden-sharing. She co-chairs coordination on TRIPS Council issues affecting pandemic preparedness, giving her direct institutional exposure to how IP and pathogen-sharing interact in practice.

In the WHO Pandemic Agreement negotiations, Moon has been explicit that PABS is not peripheral: it is the operational core. Her argument is that access commitments in the treaty body are meaningless unless there exists a binding mechanism obligating countries to share pathogen samples promptly and on terms that do not permit monopoly-holding. She is one of the few analysts who has modelled the downstream consequences of a PABS-less treaty and found them indistinguishable from the status quo.

During the final phase of WHO Pandemic Agreement negotiations, Moon was among the most cited academic voices warning that a treaty without a resolved PABS annex fails its central purpose. She has consistently drawn the line between diplomatic progress on the treaty text and substantive progress on equity: the two do not automatically follow each other. Her analysis of pandemic financing gaps complements her PABS work, arguing that even with equitable access rules, low-income countries cannot benefit without sustained pre-negotiated financing mechanisms for vaccine procurement.