GENEVA: The WHO chief and Brazil’s president on Monday urged the G7 to summon the “courage” to finish the international treaty on handling future pandemics.
Wealthy countries and developing nations are at loggerheads over how the pandemic agreement, which was adopted last year, will work in practice.
In a joint open letter, the World Health Organization’s chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva demanded that the G7 leaders show “political will at the highest level” to finalize a key missing part.
“The world must finish what it started,” they wrote.
The agreement’s unfinalized Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS) mechanism deals with sharing access to pathogens with pandemic potential, then sharing benefits derived from them, such as vaccines, tests and treatments.
