Negotiating Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS): Recommendations and Priority Issues

In May 2025, after over three years of negotiations, Member States of the World Health Organization (WHO) adopted the Pandemic Agreement; a new treaty intended to respond to some of the inequities seen during the COVID-19 pandemic and establish new frameworks for pandemic prevention, preparedness and response. At least sixty countries must ratify the agreement before it can enter into force. However, the Agreement will not open for signature and ratification until an Annex on Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS) has been negotiated by a WHO Intergovernmental Working Group (IGWG) open to all WHO Member States and adopted by the World Health Assembly (WHA). This is especially difficult as PABS has been one of the most contentious issues during the negotiations.The IGWG will negotiate the Annex based on an outline provided in Article 12 of the Pandemic Agreement. Article 12 reaffirms sovereign rights of states over their biological resources and recognizes the importance of making pathogen samples and sequence information available for research and development (R&D). In return, manufacturers that use the samples or sequence information to develop or produce vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics (VTDs) agree to provide a proportion of the resulting benefits to the WHO for distribution to countries during a pandemic. Article 12 includes a target that manufacturers participating in the System reserve up to 20% of their pandemic-related production for WHO allocation during pandemic emergencies: 10% as donations, and the remainder for purchase at ‘affordable’ prices. However, the specifics of the PABS System are yet to be agreed. The IGWG met for the first time in July 2025. It now has less than nine months to submit the outcome of its negotiations to the next WHA in May 2026. We are a group of academics who work on Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) and related issues. We have followed the Pandemic Agreement negotiations with great interest, understand just how complicated the ABS landscape has become and are concerned about the further fragmentation of an already complex international legal system.The opportunities for scientific, legal and policy experts to provide input to the Pandemic Agreement negotiations have, however, been limited. We, the undersigned, have developed a list of recommendations for the IGWG as they negotiate a specialized international ABS agreement that must function in harmony with existing international and domestic laws, facilitate R&D on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response, and share those benefits in a fair and equitable manner. This is a tall order and will require negotiators to comprehensively address a number of scientific, legal and policy factors we outline below. We have also identified priority areas of consideration where there is no ‘one’ solution but instead, negotiators will need to balance technical, legal, diplomatic and political factors in making key decisions around the operation of PABS. We hope these recommendations and considerations prove useful in what is bound to be a fraught negotiation process, with multiple competing interests involved.