The WHO Pandemic Agreement was adopted by the World Health Assembly in May 2025, a rare moment of multilateral consensus after years of negotiation. But under Article 31.2, the agreement cannot open for signature or ratification until one piece is finished: the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing annex, known as PABS.
PABS would set the rules for how pathogen samples and genetic sequence data get shared quickly during an outbreak, and how the vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics developed from that sharing get distributed back, fairly, to the countries that shared in the first place.
Rounds of Intergovernmental Working Group negotiations on the PABS annex, the eighth of which concluded in Geneva on September 18 without agreement.
The divide is familiar, and structural
Negotiators describe the gap as running broadly along global north and south lines: wealthier countries want streamlined access to pathogen data, while lower-income countries, often the first to detect and report new outbreaks, want binding guarantees that the resulting products come back to them, not just goodwill commitments.
The UN meeting added pressure, not resolution
The second UN General Assembly High-Level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response took place September 25 in New York. Its political declaration calls for timely completion of the PABS annex, but a declaration is not an annex, and countries left Geneva the week before still far apart on the contractual and laboratory-network details.
For any company working on pandemic-relevant diagnostics, vaccines or therapeutics, PABS is the framework that will eventually govern access to outbreak samples and the terms attached to products developed from them. Its absence is not just a diplomatic delay, it is an open question over the rules of the next emergency.
What to watch
Watch whether the IGWG's ninth round makes more progress than its eighth, and watch how individual countries hedge in the meantime. The US, outside the agreement entirely after its January 2026 WHO withdrawal, is already signing bilateral pathogen-for-aid deals with individual countries, a parallel track some negotiators worry could undercut the multilateral system before it is even finished.
Global health security infrastructure is being built in real time, and unevenly. Companies operating across multiple regions should expect to navigate both an eventual multilateral PABS system and a growing set of bilateral arrangements running alongside it, not one clean framework.