Webinar | Latest WHO PABS Text: A Blueprint for Biopiracy?

Together with People’s Health Movement (PHM), Third World Network (TWN), Public Service International (PSI) and G2H2

📅 Thursday, 19 March 2026 | 13.00 PM CET
📍 Online
Register

With negotiations on the Pandemic Agreement entering what may be the final phase, the future of the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS) System hangs in the balance. A newly released Bureau’s draft text has sparked concern for largely accommodating the demands of the European Union and other G6 countries while sidelining proposals from developing nations aimed at ensuring transparency, accountability, legal certainty and concrete benefit-sharing on an “equal footing”.

Critics warn that the current approach risks turning what was meant to be a mechanism for equity into a framework for institutionalising biopiracy – where pathogen samples and genetic sequence data are shared from the Global South, through a system that is not fully accountable and where the resulting vaccines, diagnostics, and technologies are captured and controlled through intellectual property monopolies.

The webinar will unpack the latest proposed text of the Bureau of Intergovernmental Working Group negotiating the PABS System as well as examine whether the PABS System will deliver on the promise of equity or entrench a new global model of extraction.

 

Panelists:

  • Sangeeta Shashikant IP & Development Programme Coordinator at Third World Network
  • Leandro Viegas Member of the University of São Paulo and Fiocruz’s Working Group on Pandemic Accord and IHR Reform
  • Lauren Paremoer Associate Professor at the University of Cape Town and member of the People’s Health Movement
  • Guilherme Faviero Director of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s Global Public Health Institute at the University of Miami
  • Moderator Jaume Vidal Policy Advisor at Health Action International