Two years of negotiations ended Friday without a final draft of a global agreement on how to best handle the next pandemic that public health officials say is sure to come.
After the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization was asked to write an agreement on how to respond to the inevitable next one and avoid the missteps and disparities of the last one.
“We are not where we hoped we would be when we started this process,” Roland Driece, co-chair of WHO’s negotiating board for the agreement, said Friday.
A final draft treaty was scheduled for presentation at next week’s World Health Assembly, the yearly meeting of health ministers in Geneva.
“This is not a failure,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in Geneva after the talks ended.
“We will try everything — believing that anything is possible — and make this happen because the world still needs a pandemic treaty,” he said.
The COVID-19 pandemic killed millions of people worldwide, broke health care systems and disrupted economies.
https://www.voanews.com/a/who-negotiators-fail-to-draft-pandemic-treaty-/7626586.html