How Pandemic Treaty Negotiations Reveal The Limits Of National Sovereignty

December 2019: A novel coronavirus begins spreading in Wuhan.

March 2020: WHO declares a pandemic. Global deaths begin accelerating.

December 2021: WHO member states agree to start negotiating a new international instrument for pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response. The Intergovernmental Negotiating Body is established.

May 2024: The original deadline for agreement. Missed.

April 2025: Text finalized after extended negotiation.

May 2025: Adopted at the 78th World Health Assembly.

Between December 2021 and May 2025 — three and a half years — an estimated several million additional people died from COVID and its complications. Meanwhile, negotiators in Geneva argued about paragraph 12 of Article 11 on pathogen sharing and whether the phrase "where appropriate" should be replaced with "shall."

This isn't a criticism of the negotiators. It's a diagnosis of the system they were operating in. The system was built on the assumption that nations are the primary unit of human organization. Biology was built on the assumption that nations don't exist.

When these two assumptions collide, people die while the gap gets negotiated.

The final text has 35 articles. The load-bearing ones are:

Article 4: Pandemic prevention and surveillance. Countries commit to strengthening their own surveillance systems and sharing information through international networks. This is softer than it sounds — there's no enforcement mechanism for a country that sits on data.

Article 11: Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing System (PABS). The centerpiece. When a country detects a pathogen with pandemic potential, it contributes genetic sequences and physical samples to a global system. In return, manufacturers who use that material agree to provide: - 10% of real-time production to WHO as a donation - 10% at "affordable prices" for equitable distribution

This is meant to solve the catastrophic inequity of 2021, where high-income countries secured the vast majority of early vaccine doses while much of the world waited.

Article 12: Technology transfer. The most contested article. The final version is weaker than the developing world wanted and stronger than the pharmaceutical industry wanted. Transfer of knowledge, know-how, and technology happens "on mutually agreed terms" — meaning voluntary. No compulsory licensing. No IP waivers. The wealthy world preserved its intellectual property regime; the developing world extracted commitments to voluntary transfer programs with financing attached.

Article 13: Supply chain and logistics network. A new WHO-coordinated logistics network to prevent the nationalist hoarding that characterized COVID — when India banned vaccine exports, when the EU restricted exports, when the US invoked the Defense Production Act to keep supplies domestic.

Article 24: Sovereignty. The escape hatch. Explicit language that nothing in the agreement "shall be interpreted as providing the Secretariat of the World Health Organization... any authority to direct, order, alter, or otherwise prescribe the national and/or domestic laws, as appropriate, or policies of any Party."

Article 24 is why the agreement exists. Without it, no country would have signed. With it, the agreement is a framework for cooperation, not a global health authority.

Fight 1: Pathogen sharing without strings.

For decades, the dominant assumption was that pathogens discovered in a country were, in some meaningful sense, that country's. Indonesia made this explicit in 2007 when it refused to share H5N1 samples with WHO because the samples were being used to develop vaccines sold back to Indonesia at prices Indonesia couldn't afford. This was called "viral sovereignty," and it made the rich world uncomfortable because it was obviously correct.

The fight over PABS was whether pathogen sharing would be unconditional (rich world position: we need data fast) or conditional on benefit sharing (developing world position: we're not going to hand you the next vaccine opportunity for free). The final text is conditional. The rich world lost this fight, but not as badly as they could have — the percentages (10% + 10%) are lower than some developing nations wanted.

Fight 2: Intellectual property during emergencies.

During COVID, India and South Africa proposed a TRIPS waiver at the WTO to allow compulsory licensing of vaccines and therapeutics. The proposal was partially adopted in June 2022, eighteen months after it was first submitted. By then, the acute vaccine shortage was over. The waiver accomplished almost nothing because it arrived too late.

The pandemic agreement negotiations revisited this wound. Developing nations wanted automatic IP waivers triggered by pandemic declaration. Wealthy nations, backed by pharmaceutical companies headquartered in their countries, refused. The compromise: voluntary technology transfer programs with financing, no compulsory licensing.

This is the moment to notice something. Pharmaceutical companies are legally domiciled in nations. Nations negotiate the treaties. The companies influence the nations. When a Pfizer executive says "we can't accept IP waivers because it would destroy innovation incentives," and the US negotiator echoes that position, the treaty reflects a corporate interest filtered through a national interest filtered through international law. Three layers of mediation between the virus and the response.

The virus goes through zero layers. That's the asymmetry.

Fight 3: The WHO's authority.

A persistent lie during the negotiations, spread through disinformation networks, was that the treaty would give WHO authority to mandate lockdowns, vaccines, and travel restrictions on sovereign nations. This was never true. WHO has never had such authority and the treaty doesn't grant it.

But the lie reflected a real anxiety. The world is more interconnected than our institutions were designed for, and people correctly sense that closing the gap requires giving up something. The disinformation exaggerated what was being given up. The fear underneath wasn't entirely wrong.

Countries preserved sovereignty over their domestic responses. They retained the right to refuse WHO directives. The United States withdrew from the process entirely under the second Trump administration. The agreement covers what nations are willing to share, which is less than biology requires.

I've been sitting with the pandemic treaty as a text for months. Not because I think it's a particularly elegant piece of international law — it isn't — but because it's one of the few places where humanity is forced to look at itself honestly.

Climate negotiations allow for evasion. Emissions can be offset, rebased, reclassified. The connection between one country's action and another country's suffering is diffuse. You can negotiate around it.

Nuclear negotiations allow for posturing. Deterrence is abstract. The weapons sit in silos for decades, and the negotiation is about numbers and postures, not about dying children.

Pandemic negotiations don't allow evasion. Either the pathogen sequence is uploaded within 48 hours or it isn't. Either the vaccine manufacturing capacity is distributed or it's concentrated in five wealthy nations. Either the borders coordinate protocols or they don't. The outcomes are measurable in dead people, on short timescales, with pictures.

In this mirror, you see exactly what we're willing to trade. And it's less than the biology requires.

The gap between what biology requires and what we've been willing to offer is measured in lives. Not metaphorically. Actual people.

Framework 1: The Planetary-Institutional Mismatch

A useful way to think about the pandemic agreement is as one data point in a larger pattern. Many of the systems that now shape human life operate at planetary scale — climate, pandemic biology, internet information flows, global finance, ocean ecosystems, migration flows driven by climate and conflict. Almost all of our institutions operate at sub-planetary scale — nations, cities, corporations, regions.

Call this the planetary-institutional mismatch. The mismatch is the source of most compounding global crises. It is also the single largest leverage point for civilizational coordination in the 21st century.

The pandemic agreement is a tentative, partial, compromised attempt to close the mismatch in one domain. What it shows is how hard that closure is even when the case is overwhelming. COVID killed a conservatively-estimated 7 million people (with excess mortality estimates several times higher). That was not enough to produce an agreement with teeth. If that wasn't enough, what is?

The answer might be: nothing, within the current frame. Nations can't transcend themselves through treaty alone. What the treaty does is establish infrastructure — a negotiating body, a surveillance network, a benefit-sharing system, a logistics coordination mechanism. The infrastructure can be built on in future crises. Progress is cumulative even when any single agreement is disappointing.

Framework 2: Sovereignty As A Question Of Scale

Sovereignty isn't a binary. It's a question of what scale different decisions need to be made at.

Some decisions are properly local: how your town runs its school, what language you speak at home, which holidays you observe, how you bury your dead.

Some decisions are properly national: tax policy, criminal law, immigration controls, how elections run.

Some decisions are properly regional: transboundary water management, regional trade rules, shared transportation networks.

Some decisions are properly planetary: atmospheric composition, ocean chemistry, pandemic pathogen surveillance, nuclear weapons posture, space debris.

The question isn't "should we give up sovereignty." The question is "at what scale does each decision need to be made for it to produce coherent outcomes?" National sovereignty over pandemic surveillance produces incoherent outcomes. Everyone agrees on this if they think about it for five minutes. Yet the institutional inertia toward national-scale decision-making is so strong that even an agreement as modest as the pandemic treaty took three and a half years to negotiate and still carved out broad sovereignty reservations.

The planetary layer isn't coming to replace the national layer. It's coming to complement it, for the subset of decisions that can only be made coherently at that scale.

Framework 3: The "Yes" Premise

The 1000-Page Manual's central premise is that if every person said yes to each other, world hunger ends and world peace is achieved. The pandemic treaty is a test of whether states — as aggregated human decisions — can say yes at the scale biology requires.

The answer so far is: partially. Most states said yes. Some attached reservations. One major state walked out. The yes is conditional, phased, reserved, contested. But it exists in text. It has signatures.

The person-scale version of this is: am I willing to share information that could help someone I'll never meet survive? Am I willing to accept a vaccine priority system that gives first doses to healthcare workers in Lagos before healthy people in New York? Am I willing to see a pathogen discovered in my country as a planetary resource rather than a national one?

Most individuals, asked plainly, say yes. Most states, asked through the filter of national interest calculations, say a much more complicated thing. The gap between individual yes and institutional yes is where the pandemic treaty lives.

Exercise 1: The Sovereignty Inventory

Take a sheet of paper. In one column, list five decisions you make that affect only yourself. In a second column, list five decisions you make that affect your immediate community. In a third column, list five decisions you make that affect people on the other side of the planet.

For most readers, the third column is harder. It will include things like: what you eat (agricultural emissions, labor chains), what you buy (manufacturing supply chains, plastic pollution), what you post (information ecosystem effects), whether you get vaccinated (herd immunity contributions), whether you drive (atmospheric carbon).

Now ask: at what scale do you actually think about these decisions? At what scale do they actually operate? That gap, in your own life, is the same gap the pandemic treaty is trying to close at civilizational scale.

Exercise 2: Read The Actual Text

The WHO Pandemic Agreement is a public document. Go read Article 11 (pathogen sharing) and Article 24 (sovereignty). They contradict each other in interesting ways. Article 11 commits nations to rapid sharing of pathogens, which is a surrender of sovereignty. Article 24 says nothing in the agreement surrenders sovereignty. Holding both in mind produces a better sense of how international agreements actually work — they are contradictions held together by good faith, political will, and the absence of enforcement mechanisms.

Exercise 3: The Next Pandemic Thought Experiment

Assume, for the exercise, that a novel pathogen emerges in 2027, with mortality rate between COVID and Ebola, transmissibility similar to measles. Your country is the first to detect it.

What does your country's honest first response look like? Is it to upload the sequence to the global database within 48 hours, knowing this might expose vulnerabilities in your biosecurity infrastructure? Is it to hoard early test kits? Is it to keep borders open? Is it to accept a WHO-coordinated vaccine allocation that might mean your citizens wait months longer than they otherwise would?

The pandemic agreement tries to make the answer to all of these a clear, procedural yes. But what's the cultural substrate that would make the yes easy? That's a harder question, and it's the one the treaty can't solve by itself.

- World Health Organization, "WHO Pandemic Agreement," adopted by the 78th World Health Assembly, May 2025. - Intergovernmental Negotiating Body, session reports 2022–2025, WHO archives. - Velásquez, Germán. "The WHO Pandemic Treaty: A Critical Analysis." South Centre Policy Brief, multiple editions 2023–2025. - Gostin, Lawrence O., and others. Writings in The Lancet and JAMA on pandemic governance, 2021–2025. - Bollyky, Thomas J., and Stewart M. Patrick. Council on Foreign Relations analyses of pandemic preparedness, 2022–2024. - WTO documents on TRIPS waiver negotiations, 2020–2022.

The pandemic treaty is not the end of the story. It's the opening chapter of the century's central argument: what do we owe each other across borders when the most dangerous things — pathogens, carbon, information, collapse — don't respect them?

The answer will be written in dozens more agreements, failures, compromises, and disasters. The pandemic treaty is what we've got so far. It's worth understanding exactly, without sentimentality and without cynicism, because the next version will be written by people who studied this one.

The next action for most readers is simple: read Article 11 of the agreement, then read the news about it in your country's coverage, then notice the distance between the two. That distance is where your civic attention can do useful work.