IGWG7, the seventh session of the WHO member-state working group negotiating the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS) annex, closed in Geneva on Friday 17 July with no agreed text1. The annex is the rule that would bind countries which share pathogen samples during an outbreak to a guaranteed share of the vaccines and treatments made from them. It had opened on 6 July with Tedros calling it the last realistic chance to finish. Talks now run to IGWG8 on 14 to 18 September, with formal adoption not due until the World Health Assembly in May 2027, and this is the fourth deferral since the Pandemic Agreement was adopted.
WHO's release describes text "streamlined" on contractual arrangements, laboratory network structures and definitions of benefits. Co-chair Ambassador Tovar da Silva Nunes of Brazil said "the remaining issues are challenging, but we have a clear path to completing this important work"2. Neither the release nor the co-chairs name a blocking state.
The Africa Group and the European Union arrived with two incompatible designs, and the record from the room names the split the release does not3. The Africa Group backs a federated model: distributed national and regional laboratories and access points, tied together by binding conditions on access. The EU and other industrialised states back a hybrid model built on centralised infrastructure with looser access terms. Algeria, speaking for the Africa Group, said the federated model "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"4.
Algeria's objection turns on where the samples physically sit. Samples held in national labs stay under a supplying state's own law, where conditions can be attached and enforced; samples moved into centralised infrastructure become governed by contracts, which can be renegotiated or severed. Knowledge Ecology International, a Washington access-to-medicines group, published proposed text that sidesteps both by attaching obligations to market registration of a pandemic product, binding a manufacturer "regardless of whether that individual manufacturer utilized materials or digital sequence information (DSI)"5. DSI is a pathogen's genetic sequence, which can be emailed rather than shipped, and industry has fought to keep the duty tied to the physical sample precisely because a sequence can be downloaded by a company that signed nothing. GAVI's board approved $189 million for African vaccine manufacturing on 2 July, which buys plants; the annex is what would guarantee those plants something to make.
