Health Leaders Sound Alarm on Stalled Pandemic Treaty, Collapsing Antibiotic Pipeline

Foreign Policy's Global Health Forum brought together multilateral leaders, government officials, and private sector executives this week to confront an uncomfortable convergence: declining development aid, a deadlocked pandemic treaty, an antibiotic pipeline near collapse, and AI-enabled biothreats that didn't exist a decade ago. The day-long forum offered a rare window into how the institutions built to protect the world from the next pandemic are straining under political, financial, and scientific pressure.

• Pandemic Agreement stalls after nearly five years as pathogen access and benefit-sharing negotiations remain deadlocked; Friday's UNGA meeting may produce no outcome document
• EU global health spending faces a projected 60% drop from 2022 peaks, with a 3-month window to protect development funding in the bloc's next long-term budget
• GAVI's $500M First Response Fund deployed twice—for mpox and Ebola-Bundibugyo—exposing reliance on personal relationships rather than institutional collaboration
• Antibiotic pipeline nears collapse as Shionogi CEO warns talent is fleeing the field and calls for a Netflix-style subscription model to save last-resort drugs
• Biothreat Radar scans wastewater at U.S. airports for engineered pathogens as CEPI chair calls synthetic biology the top security threat
• Moderna co-founder warns attacks on science could spread from vaccine skepticism to cancer treatment refusal, calling it an existential threat to medicine

Why it matters: Without a completed Pandemic Agreement, the world has no binding framework for equitable access to vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics during the next pandemic—leaving the same inequities that defined COVID-19 firmly in place.