How should the world respond to the next pandemic?

Having raised the alert about the highly infectious Omicron variant of the S ars-CoV-2 virus last November, Tulio de Oliveira watched as South Africa was hit with travel bans. Already smarting at what he saw as wealthier nations’ hoarding of vaccines, anti viral drugs and test reagents, his frustration spilled over.

- Laura Spinney

“If the world keeps punishing Africa for the discovery of Omicron and ‘global health scientists’ keep taking the data, who will share early data again?” he tweeted.

Two years into this pandemic, as the World Health Organization (WHO) mulls the tricky question of when to call it over and some countries, including the UK, pre-empt that decision, attention is turning to the future.

How do we improve our response to the next pandemic? The two main challenges are improving surveillance of pathogens; and ensuring vaccine equity. And as De Oliveira intimated, these are linked. Morally and, for the first time in pandemic history, legally.

It used to be that living organisms, including pathogens, were considered common heritage, and sharing them for scientific purposes happened informally. That changed with the UN’s 1992 convention on biological diversity, which says countries have sovereign rights over genetic resources found on their territory.

Under an annex to that convention, the Nagoya protocol, the host country can set terms for accessing those resources and ensuring the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from them.

Covid-19 is the first pandemic since Nagoya entered into force in 2014, but the spirit of the protocol has n ot been respected. Starting with China in January 2020, countries have shared S ars-CoV-2-related data freely, demanding nothing in return.

That data has driven revolutions in vaccinology, pathogen sequencing and data collection. But the fruits of those revolutions have n ot been shared equitably.

Just 14% of people in low-income countries have received at least one vaccine dose, compared with about 80 % in high and upper middleincome countries.