We write to you together, from Geneva and from Brasília, with one shared conviction: that the world must finish what it started, and that you can help it do so.
A little over a year ago, the world kept the first part of that promise. After the deadliest pandemic in a century, the nations of the world chose cooperation over division and adopted the WHO Pandemic Agreement to strengthen how countries can work together to prevent, prepare for, and respond to pandemics. In a divided world, that outcome was not to be taken for granted. It was an act of hope, and an act of faith in one another. We write to you now because that hope is not yet fulfilled, and because it lies within your hands to help fulfil it.
We will not pretend the road has been easy. When Member States closed their most recent session on the first of May, they had made real progress, but agreed that more time was needed. The hardest questions, including how the benefits of shared pathogens are defined and shared, how the system is governed, and how equity is guaranteed on equal footing, are difficult for a reason. They are the very questions that went unanswered last time, while people who could have been protected were not. The world is wrestling with them now precisely because they matter so much.
So we come to you, plainly, with three requests.
Second, a spirit of equity. The PABS system rests on a simple, fair bargain: those who share dangerous pathogens quickly must be able to trust that the vaccines and treatments born from that sharing will reach their own people too. Every one of us has a stake on both sides of it. When Brazil held the G20 presidency in 2024, it led the G20 to recognize, for the first time, inequality as a driver of pandemics. This is not charity, and it is not only conscience. It is also strategy: PABS exists to stop an outbreak at its source, and containing a threat where it begins is far cheaper, in lives and in resources, than fighting a pandemic once it has spread to every continent. A virus left to burn anywhere will, in time, find everyone. There is a further reason equity matters, one that governments and industries everywhere will grasp at once: predictability. Today the rules for accessing a pathogen and sharing what flows from it are improvised case by case, often mid-crisis. PABS replaces that with a single framework known in advance, stable rules that let laboratories and partners across the world move at the speed an outbreak demands. Legal certainty does not compete with equity; it makes equity work. We ask you to ensure the annex carries equity in its operational detail, not only in its preamble, so that access and benefit-sharing are guaranteed in practice.
And we already know the price of being unready. The last pandemic took lives on a staggering scale, with estimates from WHO and others putting the toll at up to twenty million, and the International Monetary Fund estimates it cost the world economy over thirteen trillion dollars in lost output, a loss borne in every nation, in shuttered businesses, broken supply chains and a generation of disrupted schooling. Against that, the investment in a system that catches an outbreak early is small. As we write these words, an Ebola outbreak is being fought across two countries, with no approved vaccine and no cure, by responders who are risking their own lives to protect strangers. That is not a distant abstraction. It is happening now. Every month this annex stays unfinished is a month the world is less ready than it could be, and people are less safe than they deserve to be.
We made a promise to the millions we lost, and to the families who carry their absence still. Let us be the generation that keeps that promise. Finalizing this Agreement, through a shared commitment to one another, is our collective promise to protect humanity. Let us keep it, together, and in time.
Luiz Inácio Lula da SilvaPresidentFederative Republic of Brazil Dr Tedros Adhanom GhebreyesusDirector-GeneralWorld Health Organization
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