World Health Organization Approves Pandemic Agreement

The vote followed three years of discussions.

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization's director-general, speaks in Geneva on May 19, 2025. Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images

The World Health Organization (WHO) on May 20 approved a pandemic agreement that is aimed at preventing, preparing for, and responding to future health emergencies.

The treaty says countries shall adopt a “One Health approach” by taking measures to identify and address factors that start pandemics. It says that countries must train workers to prepare for and respond to health emergencies and take steps to strengthen health systems, including improving vaccine coverage.

One section outlines how pharmaceutical companies that volunteer will provide the WHO with 20 percent of their vaccines, medicines, and tests. The WHO will then distribute the products “on the basis of public health risk and need, with particular attention to the needs of developing countries.”

The exact process will be laid out in a future agreement that will be considered at the 2026 World Health Assembly.

The consensus vote took place during the assembly on Tuesday, a day after a committee meeting in which 124 countries voted in favor, zero objected, and 11 abstained.

The approval of the agreement followed three years of negotiations.

“The world is safer today thanks to the leadership, collaboration and commitment of our Member States to adopt the historic WHO Pandemic Agreement,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO’s director-general, said in a statement.

“The Agreement is a victory for public health, science and multilateral action. It will ensure we, collectively, can better protect the world from future pandemic threats. It is also a recognition by the international community that our citizens, societies and economies must not be left vulnerable to again suffer losses like those endured during COVID-19.”

The treaty builds on the International Health Regulations, which were adopted in 2005 and legally bind countries to take certain actions to prevent and respond to public health problems. China and some other nations have flouted the requirements in the past, including during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The agreement states in part that nothing in it “shall be interpreted as providing the Secretariat of the World Health Organization, including the Director-General of the World Health Organization, any authority to direct, order, alter or otherwise prescribe the national and/or domestic law, as appropriate, or policies of any Party, or to mandate or otherwise impose any requirements that Parties take specific actions, such as ban or accept travellers, impose vaccination mandates or therapeutic or diagnostic measures or implement lockdowns.”

Americans were not involved in the final stages of negotiations. U.S. President Donald Trump in January ordered the withdrawal of the United States from the WHO. Trump said the organization mishandled the COVID-19 pandemic and failed to adopt necessary reforms.

The executive order stated that any actions taken to effectuate the pandemic treaty and amendments to the International Health Regulations “will have no binding force on the United States.”

Dr Esperance Luvindao, Namibia’s minister of health and social services, who helped craft the document, is among the supporters of the treaty. She said in a statement that the agreement “is a demonstration of the shared desire by all people to be better prepared to prevent and respond to the next pandemic, with a commitment to the principles of respect for human dignity, equity, solidarity and sovereignty, and basing public health decisions to control pandemics on the best available science and evidence.”

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico is among its critics. Fico wrote on social media platform X that the agreement “undermines the principle of the sovereignty of member states and disproportionately interferes with the sphere of human rights.”