Pandemic treaty finally has teeth

The WHO Pandemic Agreement entered into force on 10 May, three months after the sixtieth state completed ratification, and with it the world acquired something it has never quite had before: a binding set of rules for what happens when the next virus jumps. The agreement covers pathogen-access and benefit-sharing, obliging countries to share samples quickly and to receive a fair share of the vaccines and tests developed from them, and it creates a standing financing mechanism backed by member-state contributions. The ink is dry; the questions start now.

The history of this document explains both its shape and its fragility. Negotiations began in the shadow of the COVID-19 failures, when the memory of hoarded vaccines and sealed labs was fresh, and they nearly collapsed more than once over the two issues that still divide the world: how fast the Global South gets access to countermeasures, and how much authority a global body gains over national health policy. The compromise that survived is recognizably a compromise: the sharing obligations are strong on paper, the enforcement is soft, and the sovereignty clauses are generous enough that the loudest critics of the WHO can claim victory while its supporters claim the same.

I want to be clear-eyed about what entering into force actually changes today, which is less than the headlines suggest and more than the sceptics allow. In the calm between outbreaks, a treaty is a piece of paper, and the financing mechanism is a set of accounts with a promising balance and no crisis demanding its use. The real test will be the first fast-moving outbreak, when a country with a new virus faces a choice between sharing samples on the agreement’s terms and protecting its own vaccine pipeline. Every agreement of this kind is written in the hope that the moment of crisis will find the institutions ready, and that hope has failed before.

The quieter significance of 10 May is procedural, and it matters more than the drama suggests. The agreement includes a review mechanism, a standing committee, and a dispute process that does not depend on goodwill; those are the unglamorous parts that turn a statement of intent into something a health ministry can actually plan around. After watching three rounds of negotiations from the outside, the treaty’s best feature is that it exists at all. A permanent, binding instrument that every member state has ratified, however loosely, is a shared reference point, and in a field dominated by ad hoc responses, a shared reference point is a form of infrastructure.

The honest assessment is that the agreement will be judged by its first crisis, and its first crisis may be years away. What happens in between is not wasted: the financing mechanism will be tested by routine immunization campaigns, the sharing platform will be used for seasonal influenza, and the committee will grind through its first reviews. Those unglamorous runs are the reps that make an institution capable when the emergency arrives. Treaties do not save lives; trained systems do, and the difference between this agreement and its predecessors is that it obliges the systems to train. That, in the end, is what ‘having teeth’ means for a document that has no jaw.