SWITZERLAND — Negotiations for a global pandemic accord are set to resume with the World Health Organization (WHO)’s Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) at their fifth meeting.
Amidst these negotiations, there have been calls for more attention to be paid towards adopting a One Health approach and less focus on organized misinformation campaigns.
The agenda for the meeting is an extension of the previous INB meeting that ended on 3 March. The meeting will continue with the text-based negotiations, and member states are rushing to meet the deadline for submitting textual proposals by 14 April.
During the three weeks since the fourth INB meeting ended, the INB Bureau has held three informal meetings to clarify a range of potentially tricky issues.
These issues include the global supply chain, One Health, technology transfer and know-how, and pathogen sharing.
One of the most important issues being discussed during the negotiations is how to ensure that the One Health approach is central to the global pandemic accord.
The Quadripartite group, which consists of the WHO, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and World Organization for Animal Health (WOAH), held their first annual meeting on Monday.
The leaders of these four organizations have called for the One Health approach to be a guiding principle in global mechanisms, including the new pandemic instrument and the pandemic fund, to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response.
The Quadripartite leaders noted that recent health emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic, Mpox, Ebola outbreaks, and continued threats of other zoonotic diseases, food safety, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) challenges, as well as ecosystem degradation, and climate change have demonstrated the need for resilient health systems and accelerated global action.
They urged all countries and key stakeholders to prioritize One Health in the international political agenda, strengthen their own national One Health policies, strategies, and plans, and accelerate their implementation.
They also called for strengthening and sustaining prevention of pandemics and health threats by targeting activities and places that increase the risk of zoonotic spillover between animals and humans.
As negotiations for a global pandemic accord resume, there has been an increase in misinformation campaigns.
These campaigns claim that the accord will deprive member states of their sovereignty, with much of this misinformation coming from sources that previously spread anti-COVID-19 vaccine messages.
WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom addressed this issue during the body’s weekly press briefing, stating that the claim that the accord would cede power to WHO is false and simply fake news.
He emphasized that countries alone will decide what the pandemic accord says and how it will be implemented in line with their national laws, and no country will relinquish sovereignty to WHO.
The sources of the misinformation are the same as those that opposed COVID-19 vaccines.
A report by the US- and UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) revealed that almost two-thirds of anti-vaccine messaging on Facebook and Twitter could be traced to just 12 prominent individuals.
They include Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who campaigns against vaccines for children; Joseph Mercola, who sells dietary supplements and false cures as alternatives to vaccines, and Christiane Northrup, who advocates for “intuitive medicine” and is also linked to the conspiracy group Q-Anon.
This misinformation had reached 59.2 million English speakers by December 2020.
Some right-wing politicians in the US, Australia, and Europe also claim that the WHO is attempting to usurp countries’ sovereignty with the pandemic accord, while Russia and China have expressed their concerns about this issue in various WHO forums.
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