Pandemic treaty talks continue after seventh round ends without final deal

Countries ended a seventh round of talks without finalising a key part of a pandemic treaty, the World Health Organization said.

The talks concern the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing system, known as PABS. The mechanism is meant to set rules on sharing access to pathogens with pandemic potential and sharing benefits derived from them, including vaccines, tests and treatments.

The pandemic agreement was adopted in May 2025 as a framework for handling future Covid-like pandemics, but countries left the PABS mechanism unfinished to get the wider deal agreed. It was meant to be completed by May 2026. Countries will only be able to start ratifying the treaty once the PABS annex is complete.

The WHO said wealthy and developing countries remain divided over how the agreement will work in practice. Another two weeks of talks at WHO headquarters in Geneva ended on Friday with only incremental progress. An eighth round of talks is scheduled for September 14 to 18.

The WHO said member states advanced negotiations on the PABS annex while agreeing that more discussions were needed to finalise a framework for a faster, more effective and more equitable response to future pandemics. It said the talks streamlined the draft text and focused on technical issues including contracts, laboratory networks responsible for handling and sharing pathogens and their sequences, and the definition of benefits arising from pathogen sharing.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said differences remained but could be bridged if countries kept the shared goal of rapid pathogen and scientific information sharing and fair benefit sharing. He said the task was urgent and that the next pandemic would not wait.

Brazilian ambassador Tovar da Silva Nunes, a co-chair of the talks, said negotiators had made meaningful progress on some of the most technically and politically complex parts of the PABS annex. He said the remaining issues were challenging but that there was a clear path to completing the work.

The pandemic agreement followed more than three years of negotiations prompted by Covid-19. It aims to improve global coordination, surveillance and access to vaccines and to avoid a repeat of the disjointed international response to the coronavirus crisis.