A new global pandemic agreement is near. But why can’t countries agree on a plan?

After more than two years of negotiations, rich and poor countries have failed — for now — to come up with a plan for how the world might respond to the next pandemic.

A global treaty to fight pandemics like COVID is going to have to wait: After more than two years of negotiations, rich and poor countries have failed — for now — to come up with a plan for how the world might respond to the next pandemic.

After COVID-19 triggered once-unthinkable lockdowns, upended economies and killed millions, leaders at the World Health Organization and worldwide vowed to do better in the future. In 2021, member countries asked the U.N. health agency to oversee negotiations to figure out how the world might better share scarce resources and stop future viruses from spreading globally.

On Friday, Roland Driece, co-chair of WHO’s negotiating board for the agreement, acknowledged that countries were unable to come up with a draft. WHO had hoped a final draft treaty could be agreed on at its yearly meeting of health ministers starting Monday in Geneva.

“We are not where we hoped we would be when we started this process,” he said, adding that finalizing an international agreement on how to respond to a pandemic was critical “for the sake of humanity.”

Driece said the World Health Assembly next week would take up lessons from its work and plot the way forward, urging participants to make “the right decisions to take this process forward” to one day reach a pandemic agreement “because we need it.”

The draft treaty had attempted to address the gap that occurred between COVID-19 vaccines in rich and poorer countries, which WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said amounted to “a catastrophic moral failure.”

Addressing a sullen final day of negotiations, the WHO chief insisted, “This is not a failure.”

“We will try everything — believing that anything is possible — and make this happen because the world still needs a pandemic treaty,” he said. “Because many of the challenges that caused a serious impact during COVID-19 still exist.”