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A dispute over developing a genomic repository threatens to unravel a pandemic accord, underlining the struggle to build a universal surveillance system after the coronavirus outbreak exposed sharp inequalities in access to vital data.
World Health Organization member states started the last round of talks on the accord on Monday. But officials warn that the May deadline for adoption of the treaty will be missed if poorer and richer countries cannot bridge significant divisions over a vital article, the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing System (Pabs).
A global system for sharing genomic and other data is considered crucial for surveillance against current and emerging pathogens and the development of drugs and vaccines to fight them. The WHO and countries such as the US accused China of not sharing enough data during the coronavirus pandemic.
“[Sharing genetic sequences] becomes more complicated when there are drugs, vaccines and money involved and they are not fairly distributed,” said François Balloux, director of UCL’s genetics institute. “We’ve seen that in the pandemic, it was a disaster.”
One official familiar with the negotiations said Pabs was important because it aimed to combine access to pandemic data from member states with information that fed research and development, linking them to equitable access to drugs and vaccines.
“What you want is that information flows as freely and as fast as possible, between universities and companies and researchers,” the official said.
The inequalities exposed by coronavirus are driving the position of poorer countries, the official said. Researchers in southern Africa discovered variants such as Beta and Omicron and shared their genomic sequences with the international scientific community but said countries in the region did not see the benefit in terms of increased access to vaccines.
Ellen ‘t Hoen, of research group Medicines, Law & Policy, said progress on the accord was being hindered by discussions proceeding “in silos”. “The discussion [on Pabs] would be so much easier if there were agreements on strong provisions for technology sharing in the intellectual property chapter,” she added.
Poorer countries want Pabs to reside within WHO, while richer ones would prefer the initial accord to express broad solidarity principles and fewer fine details.
“WHO has been clear that it doesn’t and shouldn’t run the databases for genetic sequence data,” said one western diplomat. “Where countries disagree is how much industry should pay and what those funds should cover beyond support for running the system and lab capacity.”
But another western diplomat warned that the industry “hates transactionality . . . the idea that a country that detects a novel pathogen that has massive pandemic risk can say, ‘No, we’re not going to share it with vaccine manufacturers because of [the rules set out by] Pabs’”.
Almost 90 per cent of publicly available coronavirus genome sequences globally are at present shared through Gisaid, the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data.
Gisaid was mired in controversy last year after allegations in the magazine Science that its president, Peter Bogner, used aliases to speak to scientists and that the platform restricted some researchers’ access to the data.
In a statement to the Financial Times, Gisaid said it “fully” denied the allegations and that they should be viewed “with significant scepticism”.
But the claims emerged amid concerns over Gisaid’s governance and the lack of a clear adjudication structure in case of complaints. WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the FT last year that Gisaid was “doing a good job” but that there were “some problems they need to really fix” around governance.
Gisaid said it had remedied the issues by creating a new compliance board and expanding its scientific advisory council, measures that had created “a new layer of support” for users.
One diplomat said Pabs could be effective if it “doesn’t rely solely on Gisaid”. Another official said: “What we want to do is give WHO a co-ordinating role but it should not mean that [data] cannot be shared through established systems. It is up to the member states.”
Scientists were sometimes reluctant to share sequences through other platforms because they could lose rights over their work, said Balloux.
Those producing data were “not necessarily rewarded . . . In an ideal world we’d like everyone to have access” and credit, he said.
Time to reach consensus and to keep the pandemic treaty alive was running out, observers said. “It’s hard to see a way through with this text,” said one of the diplomats, who added that extending the deadline or slimming down the provisions in the draft treaty might be necessary. “The next few days will be crucial because at the moment there’s no plan,” they said.
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