Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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It's Lindsay Smith-Rogers, and today, some good news for global health.

Since 2021, countries have been drafting a pandemic

treaty aimed at ensuring there's a better global response to the next pandemic. On April 16th,

the WHO announced that an accord was reached in the world's first global pandemic treaty.

Dr. Alexandra Phelan, an expert in global health law with the Johns Hopkins

Center for Health Security, returns to talk with me about the treaty, some exciting inclusions,

next steps, and what it means that the U.S. was not at the table. Let's listen.

Alexandra Feelein, thank you so much for joining us today on public health on call.

So you're back on the podcast to talk about an update to a really exciting topic, the

pandemic treaty.

Can you give us a quick background on the pandemic treaty and how we got to where we are now?

Yeah, absolutely.

Thanks for having me.

It is an exciting moment to be back, but it has all just happened. So about three years ago, in the wake of the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, WHO World Health Organization member states decided that they wanted to review the international system. And as part of that process was they wanted to look at creating a new

international legal instrument to address many of the gaps that was seen during COVID-19,

particularly around international inequities in vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics,

but also some of the gaps that had been recognised in previous outbreaks like Ebola and

...