For more than the past three years, the WHO has been trying its best to push the Pandemic Treaty and amendments to the International Health Regulations in unholy haste, instead of conducting a proper appraisal of the impact of the measures taken during the Covid-19 pandemic—a routine exercise after any pandemic to guide future strategies.
This raises questions about whether the WHO, under China’s influence, is trying to conceal its acts of omission and commission during the pandemic, including obstructing investigations into the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The WHO recently faced a setback when the USA decided to cut all ties with the organization.
The USA’s action should make other countries ponder deeply whether it is prudent to align with the WHO during future pandemics, given its close ties with China, which cannot be trusted. Brushing these issues under the carpet, most countries at the recent World Health Assembly meeting seemed to support the WHO.
On 20 May 2025, the World Health Assembly reached a “historic” Pandemic Agreement to make the world ostensibly safer from future pandemics. As stated on the WHO website:
- Agreement’s adoption follows three years of intensive negotiation launched due to gaps and inequities identified in the national and global COVID-19 response.
(Comment: Instead of framing a treaty and amendments to the International Health Regulations in unholy haste, the WHO should have conducted an audit to identify what interventions went wrong, as most of the measures recommended during the pandemic caused more collateral harm than good. This would have helped member states draft more evidence-based, robust guidelines for future pandemics. Instead, the draft Treaty and IHR amendments reinforce the same measures—movement restrictions, mandated interventions, non-accountability, etc.)
- Agreement boosts global collaboration to ensure a stronger, more equitable response to future pandemics.
(Comment: Africa received the fewest vaccine supplies during the pandemic yet suffered the least! WHO’s interest in equitable resources should not be limited to vaccines but also include safe water, sanitation, living conditions, nutrition, and so on. Africa and other poor countries suffer from inequitable distribution of these health determinants, not from lack of vaccines.)
- Next steps include negotiations on the Pathogen Access and Benefits Sharing (PABS) system.
(Comment: The WHO statement does not elaborate on this—and for good reason. This is the stumbling block in the Pandemic Agreement, mired in controversy. Because of this, the agreement is not yet open for signature and will not be until this contentious issue is resolved. PABS has been on the negotiating table since the start but has now been relegated to a separate annex to allow the less contentious parts of the Pandemic Agreement to be adopted now.)
Advocates of PABS believe it will secure pathogen samples for research and development (R&D) and deliver equity by providing a legal mechanism for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to access vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics (VTDs) in a competitive pharmaceutical marketplace that often excludes them.
However, many contentious issues surround PABS, including its scope, ensuring benefits outweigh costs, criteria for allocating benefits based on “needs,” transparency of deals, tracking and tracing, pathogen digital sequence information, and intellectual property rights. Most of these issues have appeared in previous drafts of the system in some form, with no consensus reached. Member states therefore chose to excise the PABS system and negotiate it separately to reach consensus on less contentious issues in time for this week’s WHA.
(Comment: It is baffling that member states think they can resolve the most contentious issues of the past three years simply because PABS is now in a separate annex and must be negotiated within a year. We also worry that PABS may encourage more hazardous “gain of function” research, which rogue countries may conduct nefariously, triggering a biological warfare arms race.)
Thus, at present, the World Health Assembly has effectively adopted a partial pandemic agreement on 20 May 2025. India has not clarified whether it has formally agreed to this adoption. The Agreement will be opened for signing only after its annex—the contentious PABS—is negotiated and adopted by the World Health Assembly. In terms of timeline, a full Agreement can only be adopted next year in 2026, and will be open for signing for another 18 months thereafter.
This gives India a window of opportunity for debate and discussion in Parliament, with inputs from public health experts, civil society, legal experts, and bioethicists before signing the Treaty. We hope good sense prevails, and India takes a cue from the USA in distancing itself from the WHO—an unelected, unrepresentative, and unaccountable body engaged in a power grab, promoting the interests of the pharmaceutical industry over human health. Another important consideration is WHO’s strong influence by China, which may not be in India’s best interests.
Why did the USA withdraw from the WHO? Lessons for India
In his address to the World Health Assembly, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the US Health and Human Services Secretary, stated that the WHO is a legacy institution that did some good work in the past but is now mired in the following contentious issues:
- Bureaucratic bloat
- Entrenched paradigms
- Conflicts of interest
- International power politics
- Undue influence of China, which suppressed reports at crucial junctures
- Lack of transparency and accountability
- WHO collaborated with China to promote the “fiction” that the virus evolved naturally
- WHO does not appear interested in the health of citizens; instead, it promotes corporate medicine and pharmaceutical industry interests
Kennedy emphasized the need for global collaboration in pandemic preparedness and health promotion, but the WHO, with its conflicts of interest and lack of transparency and accountability, is not the right organization for these functions. He specifically stressed the need to address the chronic disease epidemic that is afflicting people. Health care should serve the public’s needs, not industry interests. To this end, he intends to address:
- Reducing food dyes and harmful additives in food
- Investigating the causes of autism
- Controlling consumption of ultraprocessed foods
- Promoting healthy lifestyle changes
- Collaborating with like-minded countries to promote global health and pandemic preparedness
Conclusion
If overall population health is promoted through lifestyle changes, healthy nutrition, and obesity control—particularly in affluent Western countries and rapidly growing Eastern economies—the impact of future pandemics will be minimal. It is in India’s interest to align with the USA on global health rather than with the WHO, which is heavily influenced by “difficult-to-trust” China. Most importantly, these contentious issues demand open public debate and discussion among parliamentarians, civil society, health experts, legal experts, bioethicists, and others.
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*Dr Amitav Banerjee is a Clinical Epidemiologist, presently Professor Emeritus at DY Patil Medical College, Pune, India. He served in the armed forces for 27 years and once headed the Mobile Epidemic Team at AFMC Pune as a field epidemiologist. He was ranked among the top 2% of scientists globally by Stanford University in 2023 and 2024. He authored the book, Covid-19 Pandemic: A Third Eye
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