Open letter to leaders of G7, G20, BRICS and all nations on finalizing the WHO Pandemic Agreement’s Pathogen A

Against that probability, world leaders have a narrow window: negotiators meet in Geneva from July 6 to 17 to finalize the last missing piece of the WHO Pandemic Agreement. On June 15, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva published an open letter to G7, G20, and BRICS heads of state, urging them to deliver the political signal their delegations need to close the deal.

The missing mechanism

The Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing annex, known as PABS, is the operational backbone of the Pandemic Agreement that member states adopted a little over a year ago. Until it is finalized, the agreement cannot enter into force. PABS establishes a single framework for countries to rapidly share pathogen genetic data and physical samples, and to route the resulting diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines back to the nations that contributed material.

When member states closed their most recent negotiating session on May 1, they had made progress but agreed the hardest questions, including benefit definition, governance, and equity guarantees, required more time. The July session is now positioned as the decisive round. The letter frames the ask in three parts: political will at the highest level, a binding spirit of equity, and a July 17 deadline treated as final rather than symbolic.

The cost of delay, measured

The case for urgency rests on hard data. WHO and partner estimates place COVID-19 mortality at up to 20 million lives. The International Monetary Fund calculated the economic damage at over $13 trillion in lost output, a figure distributed across every nation in shuttered businesses, broken supply chains, and disrupted schooling. Against that scale, the marginal cost of building a system that catches an outbreak at its source is modest.

A live test case is already running. The letter notes an ongoing Ebola outbreak being fought across two countries, with no approved vaccine and no cure, by responders risking their own safety. The current architecture does not yet provide the kind of predictable, equitable pathogen-sharing rules such crises demand.

Sovereignty, equity, and what to watch

The letter addresses sovereignty directly. Article 22, paragraph 2 of the Pandemic Agreement states that nothing in the document grants WHO authority to direct or alter national laws, impose lockdowns, mandate travel restrictions, or require vaccinations. Those decisions remain with sovereign states.

On equity, the letter invokes Brazil's 2024 G20 presidency, which secured the first formal recognition of inequality as a driver of pandemics. PABS, in this framing, is strategy as much as conscience: containing a pathogen at its origin is cheaper, in lives and resources, than containing a pandemic after global spread. The July session will test whether negotiators can translate that principle into operational detail that laboratories and industry partners can execute at outbreak speed. The signal to watch is simple: a public, top-level commitment to treat July 17 as a deadline rather than a milestone.