The seventh Intergovernmental Working Group (IGWG7) on the WHO Pandemic Agreement opened in Geneva on Monday 6 July, running to 17 July, to try again on the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS) annex1. PABS is the mechanism meant to guarantee that countries which share virus samples receive the vaccines made from them, and it has been deadlocked since the World Health Assembly, WHO's member-state governing body, deferred it in May, with talks stalling again ahead of this session.
On Monday 15 June, Brazilian President Lula and WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus co-signed an open letter to the leaders of the G7, G20 and BRICS, naming 17 July "a deadline, not a milestone." That letter carried the first head-of-state signature on the PABS push; the two earlier extensions bore only WHO's name. The letter set out the three unresolved questions plainly: how benefits are shared, how the system is governed, and how equity is guaranteed.
PABS turns on one trade: manufacturers and rich states hold the production capacity, while the countries where novel pathogens most often emerge hold the samples and want binding access in return. That North-South bargain is the pandemic-era successor to a 2011 influenza-only framework, which itself took four years to negotiate; extending it to every pathogen is the harder task now stalled. A Brazilian president signing the demand signals which side now feels the urgency.
