Mr. Joe Hanly:

There is not an avenue for general amendments to be submitted. It is done through the negotiating teams. They are supported by a secretariat from the WHO. Those people obviously sit in and listen in on all the sessions. They constantly revise and tweak the text. There are revisions of text and new paragraphs are put back out to the general groups to discuss and give their observations, whether good, bad or indifferent, whether they will not have it, are all for it, and everything in between. The bureau takes the sense of that. The objective when this started was to have a full agreement to go to the WHA on 27 or 28 May.

This current session is an extra session that was not planned in the original timetable. They believe there was some possibility of getting to an agreement, which they believe is absolutely necessary. Some elements of this will be put out. It will be agreed or at least included in the text at a high level. There are two areas. One is the area of One Health, which is poorly understood by less developed countries, which have significant concerns about it. It is the bringing together of veterinary, plant and humans as related ecosystems. You have to protect all the ecosystems, including the animal, the human the plant, to maintain world health. A working group is to be set up following the WHA. That has a lifetime of two years, by which time its work will become substantive.

The other area is called PABS, which is pathogen access and benefit sharing. This is about some of the intellectual property material, access to knowledge and DNA information and DNA sequencing, so the first country that sequences the latest pathogen would make it freely available, more or less like what happened during the Covid pandemic, when the Chinese authorities released the first sequence of Covid. All the other laboratories worked on it thereafter. That type of co-operation and doing so quickly and on an equitable basis is part of this. Those areas are still highly contentious among the group but it believes there is enough at a high level that it can include for an agreement and that a working group will complete that work over the next two years. It all becomes substantive on 31 May or 1 June 2026.