In their effort to ensure that they have ready access to life-saving vaccines, the governments of many less developed countries are making demands that could end up killing the very companies that research and develop them. Some governments of developed countries with pharmaceutical companies that research and develop these drugs are holding firm against those demands, thank goodness.

That’s the short explanation for what’s going on in Geneva, where health ministers from the 194 World Health Organization member states have gathered to try to pick up the pieces of a failed negotiation over the terms of a proposed new “pandemic preparedness” treaty.

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 outbreak, many member states thought it would be a great idea to better plan and prepare for the next international outbreak, and they thought it made sense to try to do it together. Unfortunately, rather than start that process by making reforms to the World Health Organization – which performed poorly during the COVID outbreak, covering as it did for the Chinese Communist Party’s abysmal behavior – they went right at the heart of the problem, as they saw it: Developed countries had healthcare (largely pharmaceutical) infrastructures that they did not, and that “inequity” needed to be addressed.

Beginning in 2021, delegates from the member states started talking about two related efforts – amending the International Health Regulations (IHR) that first went into effect in 1951, and drafting a new treaty designed to help member states better prevent, prepare for, and respond to an........

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