WHO chief presses Geneva negotiators to finish pandemic treaty
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus cites the Ebola Bundibugyo outbreak in DR Congo and hantavirus cases this year, with benefit-sharing rules still unresolved.
The head of the World Health Organization told negotiators in Geneva on Monday that deadly outbreaks of Ebola and hantavirus show why governments must finish the pandemic agreement they adopted last year and left partly unwritten.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus spoke at a negotiating meeting on the Pandemic Agreement, which countries adopted in May 2025 as a framework for handling a pandemic on the scale of COVID-19. To get the deal over the line, they left out the hardest question: how its central mechanism would operate in practice.
That mechanism, the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing system, is meant to govern how pathogens with pandemic potential are obtained, and how the vaccines, tests and treatments derived from them are distributed. Wealthy countries and developing nations remain at odds over how it should work.
Tedros pointed to the Ebola Bundibugyo strain spreading in Africa and to hantavirus outbreaks this year. "A pathogen threat anywhere can become a threat everywhere, to people of every country," he said, according to a written version of his remarks. "The outbreak of hantavirus earlier this year, and the ongoing Ebola epidemic in DRC remind us of this threat."
He said the purpose of the treaty was "about protecting people". During the COVID-19 pandemic, he said, "the world developed vaccines in record time, but too many countries were left waiting while others secured far more than they needed".
Hans Kluge, the WHO's regional director for Europe, said access to medicines had been raised repeatedly by member states in his meetings across all six of the organisation's regions. Kluge is on special leave from the post while he runs for WHO director-general.
"That is why we need a system where countries can quickly share pathogen samples and data, while ensuring that the vaccines, tests and treatments developed from them are shared fairly," Kluge wrote on X. He said the world cannot afford to repeat the inequalities seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The meeting in Geneva is the latest round of talks aimed at settling the outstanding provisions of the agreement.
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