Reform laws to boost Pandemic Treaty

Business interests and intellectual property laws privilege the wealthy and leave the rest scrabbling for life-saving medicine

- Rafia Akram

After three years of intense negotiations, the World Health Organisation (WHO) member states have reached consensus on the Pandemic Treaty, officially known as the WHO Pandemic Agreement, a global legal instrument intended to prevent and respond to future pandemics more equitably.

This milestone comes in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which revealed — and in many ways exacerbated — the deep inequalities that divide the Global North and South, particularly in access to medicines, vaccines and medical technologies.

Although the pandemic accelerated international cooperation in some respects, it also starkly exposed a system in which legal and economic structures privileged the wealthy and left the rest scrambling for survival.

At the heart of these discussions lies a controversial and complex issue: the intersection of business interests, intellectual property law and the right to health.

During the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, countries in the Global South were often last in line to receive vaccines, ventilators and personal protective equipment, despite having contributed significantly to research, clinical trials and global health surveillance efforts.

The primary interest of pharmaceutical companies being how much money they can make meant that vaccines were distributed primarily to wealthier nations first, often in surplus quantities that later expired unused, while lower-income countries were forced into costly and legally onerous contracts or waited months, if not years, for access to basic health interventions.

This disparity was not accidental. It was the result of decades of a legal framework that embedded inequality into the global health ecosystem, a legal framework that aided multinational pharmaceutical companies largely based in the Global North.