MILES PARKS, HOST:
This week, more than 190 member states of the World Health Organization finalized a treaty to help prevent the next pandemic. It's the first agreement of its kind in the world. Countries have agreed to share data, technology and vaccines in the event of another disease outbreak. It took more than three years of negotiations before the pandemic treaty was finalized, and it was done without the U.S.'s involvement after President Trump announced his intention to pull the U.S. out of the WHO when he took office.
Here to tell us more about the talks and the treaty is Precious Matsoso. She's the former director general of the South African National Department of Health, and she served as co-chair of the group tasked with creating the treaty. Welcome, Precious, to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
PRECIOUS MATSOSO: Thank you so much for inviting me.
PARKS: So I'm sure this gets in the weeds really quickly, but I'm hoping to kind of talk about the broad strokes of what all of these countries agreed to in this treaty. Let's start there.
MATSOSO: Well, I think the first thing is that they agreed to having prevention measures. As you know, prevention was weak during the COVID pandemic, but also countries were ill-prepared. So the preparedness measures are actually enhanced in this pandemic agreement. The second is provisions for ensuring equitable access to pandemic health-related products, and these are vaccines, diagnostics, as well as therapeutics.
But in addition, there's a very important provision, and this has to do with pathogen access and benefit sharing. As you know, there's always been some biological materials and information that are shared during pandemics. In this regard, those who share these biological materials are of the view that it is important that they should also benefit.
PARKS: Well, that's what I was going to ask because the pathogen access and benefit sharing seems to be, to me, one of the most interesting parts of this treaty because I know in the past - right? - countries have had an issue with sort of giving up information on pathogens and not feeling like they were then rewarded or something with access to the medicines that came from giving that information. Can you explain that a little bit more?
MATSOSO: When there's an outbreak, particularly of a pathogen of unknown origin, it is very important to quickly characterize it - how it is spread, how virulent it is. So for that to happen, there must be timely access to that pathogen. That's the first thing. But the argument is that it cannot just be sharing of the pathogen, biological materials or information. There must also be benefits that are accrued from that.
PARKS: Well, that makes a lot of sense to me, especially in theory, but I guess I wonder, once we're down the road, whether it's in a few years or decades, how will some of these decisions that you all came to over the course of these years of negotiations - how will they actually be enforced when things - like they were back in March or February or April of 2020 - when things are kind of going crazy in the beginning of one of these moments, how will this treaty actually be enforced?
MATSOSO: Well, there are a number of institutional arrangements that have been considered. The first one is that of creating a conference of parties that will be a governance body. The second is having a global logistics network that is supposed to ensure that the products move across different parts of the world, across different regions. As you know, different regions also have their own mechanisms, so you need a network that ensures that there's some information exchange across different regions, different countries, so that at any point in time, you have a fair understanding of where the quantities are and where they - of vaccines, huge quantities, oversupply, stockpiles - so that these can be measured against where the need is.
PARKS: So how did it impact negotiations when the United States announced their intention to pull out of the WHO earlier this year?
MATSOSO: The United States has played a very important role during negotiations. As I can confirm, U.S. has the best experts in the world, and they were able to bring these experts, when needed, to guide and advise and bring technical knowledge to the discussions, which were quite valuable. In fact, when the U.S. announced its withdrawal, it was quite clear that, you know, it's a loss. It's a loss because the whole institutional and intellectual capital that the U.S. has will be lost.
But of course, we do know that countries have their national interests. It is for that reason that when you have an agreement, any treaty or convention, there'll always be provisions that allow for reservations. And our view was that one would have thought that the U.S. would have joined and only reserved in those areas where they were uncomfortable, rather than just withdrawing completely from the negotiations. It is unfortunate.
PARKS: Can I ask kind of broadly, as you think about ahead of whenever the next pandemic does occur, how confident are you that the response will be better than what we saw with COVID?
MATSOSO: You know, I'm quite confident. And coming from the African region, which has been hit by multiple, multiple crises - pandemics, outbreaks, epidemics and natural disasters - happening all at once, we've seen the kind of response - and the recent example is a beautiful one, actually - that of Rwanda dealing with a outbreak, Marburg. And they were able to deal with this within - in less than hundred days. And we're beginning to see that trend in other countries, so I'm very confident that countries will respond appropriately.
PARKS: That's global health expert Precious Matsoso, who worked on this new pandemic treaty. Thank you so much, Precious, for joining us.
MATSOSO: Thank you so much for inviting me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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