From 27 April to 1 May 2026, the Intergovernmental Working Group on the WHO Pandemic Agreement (IGWG) convened in Geneva for its final session before the Seventy-ninth World Health Assembly. The session addressed the further development of a mechanism central to the future global health architecture: The PABS Annex to the WHO Pandemic Agreement is intended to give operational and legal form to a multilateral system for the rapid, safe and traceable sharing of pathogen materials and related sequence information, while ensuring that such access is linked to fair and reliable benefit-sharing. Through the timely sharing of information and regulated access to medical countermeasures, the system is meant to enable a faster and more binding response to future pandemics.
An agreement, originally sought ahead of the Seventy-ninth World Health Assembly (WHA79), scheduled from 18 to 23 May 2026, could not be reached. Differences between negotiating groups remained too substantial, particularly between many developing and emerging economies, through the Africa Group and the Group for Equity, and several industrialised countries, including the EU Member States. The absence of a conclusion may initially disappoint, given the intensive efforts of WHO Member States and the active participation of civil society actors all throughout the process. Yet the agreed extension of the negotiations signals, first, that the legal, technical and political complexity of the PABS system is not being compressed for the sake of a premature compromise. And second, that Member States, despite acute disagreements, remain committed striving for a common system and to bring the Annex to a viable conclusion.
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The ‘Geneva Telegram’ analyses and documents the processes in Geneva's multilateral organisations on current topics. The reports on multilateral issues draw on the expertise of the KAS Geneva team and external authors. The Geneva Telegram is supplemented by the Maps of the Month, which summarise the voting results of UN member states on selected topics.
