Thursday, 21 May 2009
Delegates at the World Health Assembly will have to grapple with how best to deploy their delegations to simultaneously cover pandemic influenza and resolving the outstanding elements of the WHO IGWG Plan of Action.
Today’s WHO Journal lists the following morning schedule for Committee A.
Item 11 (continued) Medium-strategic plan, including Proposed Programme budget 2010-2011
To consider appropriation resolution for financial period 2010-2011
Item 12 (continued) Technical and health matters
Item 12.1 (continued) Pandemic influenza preparedness: sharing of influenza viruses and access to vaccines and other benefits
At the same time, Committee B will be considering commence with considering a draft report of Committee B containing resolutions on mainly budgetary and administrative matters and one item on the “Health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory, including east Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan”.
Immediately after, the first technical item discussed in the morning session of Committee B is Item 12.8 on “Public health, innovation and intellectual property; global strategy and plan of action.” Today is when member countries at the World Health Assembly decide whether they are serious about the commitments they negotiated the WHO Global Strategy item on action item 2.3(c) namely, to “encourage further exploratory discussions on the utility of possible instruments or mechanisms for essential health and biomedical R&D, including inter alia, an essential health and biomedical R&D treaty”. As noted by my colleague Judit Rius Sanjuan, many fear that if the WHO is removed as an implementing stakeholder for this action point, the “WHO would not have the capacity to be the forum for interested governments to start these important and urgent discussions”.
The parallel committees negotiating the contentious pandemic influenza issue on the one hand (Committee A-Room XVIII) and the WHO IGWG Plan of Action on the other (Committee B-Room XVII) suggests the forces of divede et impera at play at the World Health Organization.