PABS at WHO: Global Pathogens Seized, Benefits Delayed, Justice Denied -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

According to the World Health Organization, which has created a proposed Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) annex of its new treaty framework around solidarity. Best for the countries flowing from affected by Global South, many should read is as forewarning.

Veiling their ambitions in niceties like “equity” and “cooperation,” the PABS struggle within a Pandemic Agreement displays an ancient colonial mentality rendered into contemporary law: though pathogens should be as swift as possible, justice is optional. From the next countries where outbreaks explode samples, sequences and surveillance data are expected to pour in at high volume. But vaccines diagnostics therapeutics technology? Such things can remain locked up by patents, price hurdles, production monopolies and diplomatic inertia.

This is not reciprocity. It is extraction.

The core bargain at the heart of PABS is highly suspect. In the name of Global Health Security, countries especially low and middle income ones with little bargaining power, and their fragile health systems are requested to either license or hand over pathogen materials as well as genomic information without delay. In theory, the cherries will come later: equitable health access to medical countermeasures with technology transfer and perhaps some semblance of sovereign credit. In practice, “later” is where justice goes to die.

Our eyes have been accustomed to this scenario. The world cheered scientific collaboration during COVID-19 even as it permitted vaccine nationalism, corporate hoarding and export controls. Rich states pre-purchased the future. Big Pharma defended IP as if monopolised prices were sacred over saving lives. In the meantime, much of the Global South was told to wait its turn, bury their dead and be grateful for donations.

Yet PABS stands to institutionalize that same asymmetry. It risks creating a two-tier framework in which low and middle income countries have explicit legally binding responsibilities to share biological materials but high income country governments, private manufacturers will face softer vaguer more politically palatable duties to share actual benefits. Put simply: the South provides the raw material, and who captures that value?

That is not a pandemic treaty. It is biopolitical rent-taking.

What is even more ethically offensive than the moral vagueness itself. In times of emergency, if pathogens and sequence data are treated as global public goods then vaccines, diagnostics and therapies derived from them also need to be governed together by binding rules on equitable access. Anything less is multilateralism by another name close to fraud. You cannot insist on mandatory openness from source counties while retaining commercial confidentiality, patent protection and control of supply for those who industrialise the benefits. That is not international cooperation. It is legalized double standards.

PABS defenders will argue that anything is better than nothing. But a lousy deal could be worse than deadlock if it turns past injustice into future institutional routine. Without enforceable, time-bound and transparent benefit sharing, an annex hastening pathogen sharing would not address the legitimacy crisis laid bare by COVID-19. It would deepen it.

If WHO member states are serious about achieving equity, PABS needs to be refashioned around binding obligations that deliver concrete results rather than soft aspirations. The benefits need to be automatic, quantifiable and enforceable. Technology transfer should not be a charitable slogan. Progress has to be made through building regional manufacturing capacity across the Global South, not just with compliments in conference rooms. Polite conversations are not an answer: Waivers on intellectual property barriers in declared health emergencies need to be waived. And the right of access to countermeasures that result need to be guaranteed in real time, not after high-income nations fill their stores.

Or else PABS will mean Pathogens Accessed, Benefits Avoided and Sovereignty Broken.

But this is the political question at its most basic: who must sacrifice, and whom can profit? And if the response is still poorer countries need to share first, and richer ones decide later, then we will not have a victory for global governance on our hands with the Pandemic Agreement. It will be a contract of inequality.

The world does not need a treaty to purify extraction disguised as preparedness. It requires one that acknowledges a simple, hard fact: no state should be compelled to surrender the biological keys over yet another pharmaceutical bonanza without strict assurances that its population will not again bereft of access to treatment.

PABS is not justice without that guarantee.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya Indonesia