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With a drop in government spending on preparedness and woefully inadequate donor pledges, how can the ambitious new commitments envisioned for a WHO Pandemic Accord ever be financed? This second issue of Governing Pandemics Snapshot, looks at this conundrum and possible solutions, including creative forms of debt relief for low-income nations.

Countries around the world have set a deadline of next May to produce a final draft of a global treaty on pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response — a major step in efforts to strengthen the global architecture around health security.

The secretary-general of the United Nations is pressing for major changes in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

Antonio Guterres says the International Monetary Fund has benefited rich countries instead of poor ones. And he describes the IMF and World Bank ‘s response to the Covid-19 pandemic as a “glaring failure” that left dozens of countries deeply indebted.

The 76th World Health Assembly (WHA) was the first since the World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 was no longer a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. My WHA kicked off with IFPMA colleagues at the WHO Walk the Talk, which was a healthy start to a busy week ahead.

The COVID-19 pandemic began as a grave health threat but soon exploded into a complex crisis affecting every aspect of life. Finance ministers scrambled to shore up economies and roll out unplanned social protection programs.

The latest draft of what some are calling a global pandemic treaty isn’t living up to expectations, according to sources who spoke to Nature. Circulated at the World Health Assembly (WHA) in Geneva from 21 to 30 May.

In the wake of COVID-19, the world has a new global health, multilateral financing mechanism known as the Pandemic Fund. Based at the World Bank, and officially launched in November 2022, it is the first mechanism with the specific purpose of providing sustained financing to help countries build their capacity to prevent, prepare for, and respond to epidemics and pandemics.

Soon after, or even before, North American and European regulatory agencies issued emergency authorizations for COVID-19 vaccines, high-income governments pre-purchased most of the world’s supply of these lifesaving medical products.

Member states of the World Health Organization are in the thick of negotiating mechanisms to ensure countries comply with their obligations during the inevitable next global health emergency, but sanctions don’t appear to be under consideration.

“We’re at an exciting moment in the fight for better pandemic prevention and preparedness, but it’s also a moment of jeopardy”, says Eloise Todd, co-founder and Executive Director of the Pandemic Action Network, an international network of more than 350 diverse organisations.

Equity and intellectual property (IP) rights are – unsurprisingly – the most important and trickiest issues facing countries negotiating the terms on which the next global pandemic will be addressed.

Responding to Richard Horton’s editorial published in the Lancet on February 25, 2023, University of Miami and AHF Global Public Health Institute researchers and members of the Global Pandemic Policy Group have endorsed the need to incorporate effective accountability and enforcement mechanisms into the pandemic convention

At CGD, we have been closely watching the development of the new Pandemic Fund which aims to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response (PPR) capabilities in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

The next pandemic could already be among us and climate change means no country is safe, said Peter Sands, head of the Global Fund, one of the world’s largest funders of HIV, TB and malaria programs, in an interview with POLITICO.

April is the cruelest month, wrote T.S. Eliot in his poem “The Waste Land”, published in 1922, not long after the 1918 influenza pandemic and World War I. More than a hundred years later, so too is the world coming to grips with the aftershocks of COVID-19, alongside the polycrisis of inflation, debt, food insecurity, climate change, and so on.

The fifth meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) to draft a pandemic accord started on Monday with acknowledgement by World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus that it faces a very tight timeframe.

More than 100 low- and middle-income countries have put in early bids for at least $5.5 billion from a fund that initially has only $300 million to spend to help them better prepare for pandemics.

Governments agreed on a way forward to update disease outbreak regulations ahead of meetings to draft new global guidelines for tackling pandemics, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Saturday.

The draft pandemic accord needs more emphasis on preventing pandemics at their source – where animal pathogens “spill over” to people – according to a number of organisations participating in a consultation on the document’s “zero draft” on Wednesday.

The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said its inability to serve as an “implementing entity” for the new Pandemic Fund cripples its ability to protect the health of African citizens.