A treaty to make Covid-19 the last pandemic
The world is trapped in a positive-feedback loop: disease spillovers from animals to humans become outbreaks that then become pandemics, creating catastrophic impacts that reduce resiliency and increase the socioecological drivers of spillover. Breaking this pandemic cycle requires evidence-based solutions that reduce risk across all four of these areas. We propose twelve elements for incorporation into a transformative, evidence based treaty.
Read our article:
Phelan AL & Carlson CJ (2022) A Treaty to Break the Pandemic Cycle. Science.
Breaking the pandemic cycle
and creating a safe operating space for global health, requires reducing risks across all four stages:
I. reducing spillover risk
II. reducing pandemic risk
III. reducing pandemic impacts, and
IV. ensuring recovery and resilience.
Evidence-based solutions are needed to break every step of this cycle
Across twelve elements, we describe how this can be translated into provisions under the treaty, with a focus on principles of good governance, distributive justice, and human rights.
I. Reduce Spillover Risk
1. Planetary Health solutions
Breaking the pandemic cycle requires understanding and acknowledging how it connects to other crises like climate change and the sixth mass extinction.
2. One Health solutions
Locally tailored interventions can reduce zoonotic spillover rates and protect communities living at the animal-livestock-human interface.
3. Zoonotic risk assessment
Only a small fraction of spillovers become pandemics; information sharing supports not only risk assessment, but the preemptive development and rapid deployment of countermeasures.
II. Reduce Pandemic Risk
4. Surveillance & assessment
Once an outbreak starts, all countries should be able to collect and share information, samples, sequences, and other data in a rapid and comprehensive way.
5. Biomedical R&D and production
Capacities to conduct biomedical research and development, as well as capabilities to produce diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics should be global—facilitated by equitable financing and technology transfer.
6. Health systems strengthening
Stopping outbreaks from becoming pandemics, and reducing inequities within and between countries, is dependent on strong health systems.
III. Reduce Pandemic Impacts
7. Equitable access to global goods
The Covid-19 pandemic reveals untenable injustices in vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics; without a solution, a pandemic response that embodies the idea of global solidarity or health justice is impossible.
8. Emergency legal preparedness
Leaders and public health authorities should have the legal powers necessary to act to protect public health. Legal systems should incorporate appropriate protections to enable this while providing legitimate processes to assess public health measures.
9. Least restrictive measures
Outbreak response must respect human rights. This requires ensuring that measures are necessary, proportionate and the least restrictive needed to achieve a legitimate public health outcome.
IV. Recovery and Resilience
10. Adaptive Governance
The treaty must build norms of cooperation and evidence-based policy well beyond its initial negotiation.
Explore our Adaptive Governance Database, with resolutions, drafts, reports, minutes and procedural documents relating to Pandemic Treaty negotiations and related international law matters.
Read our paper:
11. Accountability & Transparency
Public health requires public trust: civil society engagement and compliance mechanisms are essential to good governance.
12. Reduce Inequities & Injustice
Non-discrimination must be a core obligation at the heart of the pandemic instrument. The treaty must serve to reduce inequities and injustices between and within countries, and the negotiation process itself must be equitable, transparent and participatory.
