Reducing the Body Count for the Next Pandemic

The high death toll during the pandemic led to WHO’s 194 member states forming an Intergovernmental Negotiating Body to draw up a new pandemic agreement to facilitate a joint effort during global health emergencies. With nationalism, sovereignty-related concerns and an absence of collaboration as the most critical barriers to formalizing an effective agreement, the most ethical route for broadening global access to genomic and pathogenic data, vaccines, high priority research and pandemic-related products is to tie pandemic funding to global compliance standards by implementing an operational framework that requires contractual transparency, complementary exchanges of knowledge and technology and reassurances of sovereignty during the centrally administrated mitigation of a global health emergency.