UNGA81: UN Leaders Calls for Faster Action on Pandemic Preparedness

Khalilur Rahman (second from right), President of the eighty-first session of the United Nations General Assembly, chairs the High-level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Shreya Komar
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 30 2026 (IPS)

The United Nations High-level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response (PPPR) on September 25 called for faster and more sustained investment in pandemic preparedness. Speakers emphasized that future outbreaks will require coordinated action across governments, health systems, and communities.

The meeting, held three years after the General Assembly’s first high-level meeting on pandemic preparedness, focused on lessons from COVID-19 and persistent gaps in global health security.

“No country can protect itself alone,” UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed said, underscoring the need to turn the lessons of COVID-19 into long-term preparedness.

Opening the meeting, Dr. Khalilur Rahman, President of the General Assembly, highlighted three priorities: closing financing gaps, adopting a stronger “One Health” approach, and ensuring equitable access to vaccines, diagnostics, therapeutics and other essential medical tools.

“All countries need and deserve well-funded community-based systems for detection, surveillance, communication and containment,” Rahman said, calling for predictable and sustainable financing. He also stressed that pandemic preparedness must address the links between human, animal and environmental health, arguing that stronger understanding of these interactions could help prevent outbreaks from reaching human populations. Equitable access to life-saving tools, he said, is both a matter of justice and a critical component of containing outbreaks.

In a press briefing held on the same day, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that global investment in health security has declined since the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, reviving what he described as a cycle of “panic and neglect.”

Although countries and international institutions have established new mechanisms for pandemic preparedness, Tedros said the scale and speed of investment remain insufficient.

The WHO has launched and supported a range of initiatives since the pandemic, including the Pandemic Fund, strengthened pandemic and epidemic intelligence, vaccine and medical countermeasure initiatives, the mRNA Technology Transfer Programme, the WHO BioHub System and the Global Health Emergency Corps.

Countries have also strengthened the international framework governing pandemic response. In 2024, WHO member states adopted amendments to the International Health Regulations, while the WHO Pandemic Agreement was adopted the following year.

However, recent outbreaks, including Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, have underscored the continuing risk of infectious diseases crossing borders and becoming international threats. Tedros said the possibility of a future respiratory pandemic remains particularly concerning because of the potential scale of its impact.

A key issue still under negotiation is the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) system, which is intended to establish arrangements for sharing pathogen materials and information while ensuring that countries providing those resources benefit from vaccines, diagnostics and other products developed from them.

Tedros urged countries to conclude the negotiations. “So today, I leave you with just one request: get PABS done as soon as possible. Please conclude the negotiations as soon as possible,” he said. “We are as strong as our weakest link.”

He also emphasized the importance of investing in countries more vulnerable to pandemics, not as an act of charity, but rather as collective action against the common goal of pandemic prevention. Sustained financing and stronger international cooperation will be central to preventing future outbreaks from becoming global emergencies.

IPS UN Bureau Report