The WHO Pandemic Agreement is an international treaty designed to strengthen global preparedness for future pandemics. It was adopted by the World Health Assembly on May 20, 2025, making it the first new global health treaty in decades. The agreement addresses gaps exposed during COVID-19, particularly around equitable access to vaccines, coordinated funding, and early pathogen sharing between countries.
The treaty does not yet have the force of law. It will officially enter into force 30 days after 60 countries have ratified it through their own domestic constitutional processes. Until then, it sets a framework that countries can choose to join or not.
What the Agreement Actually Does
The pandemic agreement focuses on three core areas: prevention, preparedness, and response. It creates mechanisms for countries to share pathogen samples and genetic sequence data quickly when a new threat emerges. In return, pharmaceutical companies that use that data to develop vaccines or treatments must share a portion of what they produce.
Specifically, companies would be required to provide 20% of their real-time pandemic production to the WHO for distribution based on public health need. At least half of that (10% of total production) would be donated outright, with the remainder offered at affordable prices. This system, known as the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing framework, is meant to prevent the inequities seen during COVID-19, when wealthy nations secured vaccine supplies months or years before lower-income countries.
The agreement also promotes what’s called a “One Health” approach, recognizing that human health, animal health, and environmental conditions are interconnected. Countries would commit to building cross-sector surveillance systems and coordinating between public health and veterinary agencies. This matters because most emerging infectious diseases originate in animals before jumping to humans. In practice, though, many lower-income countries lack the veterinary and public health infrastructure to implement these obligations without significant outside support.
How It Differs From Existing Health Regulations
The WHO already has a framework called the International Health Regulations (IHR), which covers a broad range of public health emergencies including infectious diseases, chemical hazards, and radiological events. The IHR operates on an opt-out basis, meaning all WHO member states are bound by it unless they explicitly withdraw.
The pandemic agreement is narrower and deeper. It deals exclusively with pandemics and introduces specific mechanisms for equitable access to vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics that the IHR doesn’t include. It also establishes shared financial and logistical responsibilities between nations. Crucially, the pandemic agreement follows an opt-in model: countries must actively choose to ratify it. The two instruments are designed to work together rather than replace each other, and they share a coordinating financial mechanism for supporting implementation in developing countries.
Sovereignty Concerns and Misinformation
One of the most persistent claims about the treaty is that it would hand control of national health policy to the WHO. This is false. The agreement explicitly enshrines state sovereignty as a guiding principle. Each country retains full authority over decisions like lockdowns, vaccination policies, and border controls. The WHO Director-General and staff have no power to enforce any of these decisions on member states.
The treaty was drafted by countries themselves through the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body’s processes. No country is obligated to ratify it, and the choice to do so (or not) rests entirely with each nation’s government. Claims that the WHO could deploy troops or that national armed forces would operate under UN orders have been widely identified as misinformation by legal experts and members of the negotiating body. The WHO’s authority is confined to international health coordination work. It does not hold jurisdiction over national health policy.
Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer
Access to vaccine technology was one of the most contentious issues during COVID-19. During the pandemic, India and South Africa proposed a waiver on intellectual property enforcement for vaccines and treatments, covering patents, industrial designs, trade secrets, and copyrights. Existing international trade rules already allow governments to issue compulsory licenses for public health emergencies, permitting generic production of patented medicines with compensation to the patent holder. But these tools proved slow and difficult to use during a fast-moving crisis.
The pandemic agreement attempts to address this by encouraging pooling of knowledge, intellectual property, and data during health emergencies. It builds on earlier WHO initiatives like the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool, which sought voluntary commitments from companies to share vaccine technology. The agreement doesn’t impose blanket intellectual property waivers, but it does create a framework for faster access to the tools needed to manufacture vaccines and treatments in countries that lack domestic production capacity.
What Happens Next
With adoption complete, the agreement now moves into a signing and ratification phase. One remaining piece of work is a technical annex that still needs to be finalized and adopted by the World Health Assembly. Once that’s done, the full agreement opens for countries to sign and ratify according to their own legal processes. Some countries can do this through executive action; others will require parliamentary approval, which can take months or years.
The 60-country ratification threshold means the treaty could take considerable time to become binding international law. Under international law, compliance depends on whether states act in accordance with the treaty’s provisions, while implementation refers to how well those provisions get incorporated into domestic law and policy. The agreement’s real test will be whether enough countries ratify it and, once they do, whether the commitments translate into actual changes in how the world responds to the next pandemic.