At an historic gathering in 2021, 173 member governments of the World Health Organization (WHO) resolved to negotiate an international agreement on pandemic preparedness and response. The FNIH, in partnership with WHO’s collaborating center at Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, convened dozens of leading experts from around the world to provide technical advice and learnings to policymakers, member states, and the public. On the heels of the consortium’s report on Legal Tools for Pandemic Preparedness, the FNIH and O’Neill Institute also brought together thought leaders to consider the national sovereignty implications of a pandemic instrument, and to analyze the range of agreements previously deployed to coordinate international activity and how they might inform a treaty addressing catastrophic epidemic events.

In addition, the FNIH’s Kevin A. Klock, who co-chairs the initiative with the O’Neill Institute’s Lawrence O. Gostin, published a series of supporting papers in prominent journals and outlets, including The Lancet, Journal of the American Medical Association, STAT, and Think Global Health.

“An effective agreement will need to be carefully calibrated not only with international legal commitments in mind, but to align incentive structures that will build confidence and positively affect lives. We must keep in mind that the right of people to self-determination is also a deeply embedded principle and one that the public does not part with arbitrarily,” said Kevin A. Klock, Senior Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and General Counsel, FNIH.

A third convening, co-led with the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), commenced in the second half of 2022 and led to a 2023 report called Advancing a World Together Equitably, which explores existing mechanisms that assert equity as a priority and analyzed how they could be incorporated into a treaty.