Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing in the Pandemic Agreement: Rebuttals to Global North Arguments

For Global South countries who faced vaccine inequity during the COVID-19 pandemic, the development of an equitable Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) system is considered to be “at the heart of the political bargain” 1 of a pandemic agreement, and is critically important to prevent a repetition of vaccine inequity in future pandemics. These countries want to ensure that they have equitable access to pandemic products developed using genetic sequence data (GSD) or digital sequence information (DSI) from their geographies. A repeat of pandemic history, where GSD was uploaded from the Global South (such as from China, and from Botswana in the case of the Omicron variant), with Global South countries receiving a lower proportion of vaccine supply, would be abhorrent.