The continent needs legal guarantees that the pathogen data its member states collect will facilitate the development of pandemic products that are accessible, affordable and acceptable to their own people.
Last week, countries once again returned to the World Health Organisation (WHO) to negotiate a Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) agreement that will be annexed to the Pandemic Accord. The accord was adopted at last year’s World Health Assembly but remains incomplete until work on the PABS Annex has been completed – which is supposed to be done by May this year.
Historically, countries have freely shared pathogens among each other for the purposes of developing tests, vaccines and medicines that can fight the health problems pathogens cause. The principle of fair and equitable benefit sharing, long recognised under the Convention on Biological Diversity, has often failed in practice when applied to global health.
South Africa knows this failure all too well. When it alerted the world that a new, more infectious Covid variant – Omicron – had emerged in 2021 it received no benefits, only blowback. This took the form of travel bans and, owing to vaccine apartheid, inadequate access to vaccines offering protection against Omicron.
Back in 2014, a Guinea patient with Ebola was responsible for the pathogen sequence information that enabled the development of the Ebola treatment Inmazeb. The drug generated substantial publicly…