The WHO Pandemic Agreement Has a Pathogen-Sharing Problem Nobody Wants to Solve

When the World Health Assembly adopted the WHO Pandemic Agreement in May 2025, it was celebrated as a historic breakthrough, the first binding international instrument designed to prevent the catastrophic coordination failures that defined the COVID-19 response. But the agreement left its most contentious mechanism unresolved, and in January 2026, negotiators gathered again in Geneva to wrestle with the question that has shadowed global health diplomacy for decades: who owns a pathogen, and what does sharing it actually cost?

The resumed session of the Intergovernmental Working Group, held January 20 through 22, focused on the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing system, known as PABS. This is not a technical footnote. PABS is the engine the agreement depends on. The idea is straightforward in principle: countries that detect and share dangerous pathogens early, particularly lower-income nations in the Global South where novel viruses tend to emerge, should receive something tangible in return, whether vaccines, therapeutics, or technology transfers. Without that guarantee, the incentive to share disappears. And without early sharing, the world is flying blind when the next outbreak begins.

The problem is that "straightforward in principle" has never translated into straightforward in practice. The PABS negotiations carry the weight of a long and bitter history. Indonesia's 2007 decision to withhold H5N1 samples from the WHO system, citing inequitable benefit-sharing, exposed the fault line that has never fully closed. Developing nations watched wealthy countries purchase hundreds of millions of COVID-19 vaccine doses before lower-income populations received their first shots, and they drew the obvious conclusion: sharing biological material without enforceable guarantees of reciprocity is a losing proposition.

What makes PABS negotiations so difficult is that they sit at the intersection of public health, intellectual property law, and geopolitics simultaneously. Pharmaceutical companies, predominantly headquartered in wealthy nations, depend on rapid access to pathogen samples to develop vaccines and diagnostics. They are understandably reluctant to accept benefit-sharing obligations that could complicate licensing arrangements or reduce returns on research investment. Meanwhile, the countries most likely to be the first to detect a novel pathogen are also the countries with the least leverage in any negotiation and the most to lose if a pandemic response again leaves them at the back of the queue.

The January session continued text-based negotiations on the draft annex, meaning the core language of the PABS mechanism remains unsettled even after the parent agreement was adopted. This sequencing, adopting an agreement while leaving its operational heart to future negotiation, is not unusual in international law, but it introduces a structural vulnerability. The longer the annex remains unresolved, the more opportunity there is for political will to erode, for pharmaceutical lobbying to reshape the terms, and for member states to quietly walk back commitments made in the more optimistic atmosphere of May 2025.

The systems-level risk here is underappreciated. If PABS negotiations stall or produce a mechanism that lower-income countries view as inadequate, the agreement's early-warning architecture weakens precisely where it matters most. A country that doubts it will benefit from transparency has every rational incentive to delay reporting, conduct preliminary characterization domestically before notifying the WHO, or share samples selectively. None of those behaviors require bad faith. They are the predictable outputs of a system that has repeatedly failed to deliver on its equity promises.

There is also a feedback loop worth tracking on the industry side. If benefit-sharing obligations become too burdensome or legally uncertain, pharmaceutical companies may shift research investment toward pathogens already well-characterized, reducing the pipeline for novel threat response. The agreement is trying to create a commons, a shared infrastructure for pandemic preparedness, but commons are notoriously fragile when the parties contributing the most receive the least in return.

The WHO has described PABS as a core element of the agreement, not an optional add-on. That framing matters. It signals that the organization understands the mechanism's centrality, even if the political path to finalizing it remains unclear. What happens in the next round of IGWG negotiations will determine whether the May 2025 agreement becomes a genuine shift in how the world manages biological risk, or another well-intentioned framework that collapses under the weight of competing interests before it is ever truly tested.

The next outbreak will not wait for the annex to be finalized.