The pandemic agreement is adopted. The hard part is still being negotiated

The world now has a pandemic agreement on paper. It does not yet have a working pandemic bargain. That distinction matters because the World Health Assembly adopted the WHO Pandemic Agreement on 20 May 2025, but the instrument will only open for signature after governments finish a separate annex on pathogen access and benefit sharing, usually shortened to PABS.

The agreement is meant to answer a failure exposed by COVID-19: when a dangerous pathogen emerges, scientific samples and genetic sequence data must move quickly, but the vaccines, tests and treatments made from that information often move slowly and unequally. WHO says the accord is built around prevention, preparedness, response, equity, solidarity and national sovereignty. It covers surveillance, One Health work linking human, animal and environmental health, stronger health systems, research and development, local production, technology transfer, public communication, financing and international cooperation.

PABS is the hinge. The idea is that countries and laboratories share pathogens with pandemic potential rapidly for public-health purposes, while benefits from that sharing are also distributed quickly and fairly. PAHO/WHO says the adopted resolution launched an intergovernmental working group to negotiate that annex. The same note says participating manufacturers would make rapid access available to WHO for a target of 20 percent of real-time production of safe and effective vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics for the pathogen causing a pandemic emergency.

That is why the unfinished annex is political as well as technical. Countries that detect outbreaks early want assurance that sharing samples will not leave them last in line for medical countermeasures. Pharmaceutical producers want workable obligations. Wealthier countries want speed and legal certainty. Lower-income countries want the lesson of vaccine inequity written into enforceable rules rather than repeated as regret.

The agreement also contains an explicit sovereignty limit. WHO and PAHO both state that it gives the WHO Secretariat no authority to order national lockdowns, impose vaccine mandates, ban travellers or rewrite domestic law. Implementation remains with states. The agreement would enter into force 30 days after 60 countries ratify it, after the PABS annex is adopted and the instrument opens for signature.

For Europe, the question is not abstract. A faster outbreak-warning system, more reliable supply chains and clearer rules for emergency access would affect hospitals, border policy, civil protection and the life-sciences sector. Luxembourg is small, but it sits inside EU procurement, Schengen mobility and cross-border healthcare networks. The next pandemic agreement fight will therefore be less about whether governments remember COVID-19 and more about whether they can turn memory into obligations before the next emergency.