Скачать или смотреть The International Health Regulations and the Proposed Pandemic Treaty - Professor Sara Davies

The TRIPS Waiver: Intellectual Property, Access to Essential Medicines, and the Coronavirus COVID-19

Australian Centre for Health Law Research
QUT Faculty of Business and Law

Friday, 10 December 2021
9:00 am to 5:00 pm
Z1064, Gibson Room, Level 10, Z Block
QUT Gardens Point Campus

9:40 am– 10:00 am
The Two Track Approach to Revise the International Health Regulations and the Proposed Pandemic Treaty (or Can We Have Our Cake and Eat it Too?)
Professor Sara Davies (Griffith University)

Abstract

For over 60 years the International Health Regulations has been the World Health Organization’s only instrument available to coordinate international response to public health emergencies, including novel infectious disease outbreak events like SARS-CoV-2. The IHR has undergone multiple revisions, most recently in 2005. Since those revisions the IHR has come under scrutiny in response to health emergencies including the H1N1 outbreak (2009), MERS outbreak (2012), Ebola outbreaks (2014, 2018, 2019) and the Zika outbreak (2016), to name a few. As it became clear that the Covid-19 endemic was going to become a pandemic, WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus began to raise the prospect of an international legal instrument that could manage, specifically, pandemic events. However, with the exception of the European Union, there is no clear support for a new treaty beyond that of revising the IHR to work more efficiently and effectively. Indeed, the 2021 World Health Assembly was only able to secure a resolution to create a working group to discuss the pandemic treaty on the proviso that the IHR was also part of this discussion. This has led to the specially convened WHO Working Group on Strengthening WHO Preparedness for and Response to Health Emergencies managing a ‘two track approach’. This paper will examine the necessity of the two track approach, specifically, why the pandemic treaty proposal has endured despite significant opposition.

Biography

Dr Sara E. Davies is a Professor at School of Government and International Relations, Griffith University, Australia and an Adjunct Professor at the Gender Peace and Security Centre, School of Social Sciences, Monash University.

Sara is an International Relations (IR) scholar with a specific focus on Global Health Governance and the Women, Peace and Security agenda. Sara has been an Australian Research Council Discovery Australian Postgraduate Award Scholar (2008-2012) and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2014-2018). Sara’s research career has been devoted to identifying the political conditions that deny humans access to civil, economic and social human rights. Her research has focused on situations where humans face immense vulnerability: disease outbreaks events, gender-based and sexual violence in conflict, and forced displacement. She has recently authored Containing Contagion: Politics of Disease Surveillance in Southeast Asia (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).