Helen Clark weighing in on pandemic pact holdup
World leaders are reigniting calls for a pandemic agreement to be finalised, more than two years since negotiations began.
Among them is former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Helen Clark, who told Stuff’s daily news podcast Newsable that it’s “almost incomprehensible” no resolution has been reached, with a May 2024 deadline now just weeks away.
Clark has added her name to an open letter, alongside Dame Jenny Shipley and the likes of former United Nations General Secretary Ban-ki Moon and ex-UK Prime Ministers Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, urging accelerated progress on the global deal.
“The negotiations, if one can call them that, have been extremely difficult,” she said. “The process does not seem to have been a good one. Normally when you’re going to negotiate a text you need a draft on the table a long time before. They appeared to follow a process of putting everything, but the kitchen sink, on the table and everybody commented on that and went round and round in circles”, Clark added.
Clark has revealed that a negotiating text was only put forward last month and, as it stands, “there is nothing to sign off on” at the World Health Assembly in May.
“Are we going to just tell the World Health Assembly we’ve got nowhere? Are we going to send them something? If so, what?
“In a sense, I’m shocked but not surprised because the response to Covid-19 should have told us, I guess, how waferthin global commitments to equitable access were,” she said. “These are hard core issues of equity. And they’re not easy to resolve without goodwill towards those who have much less of anything... so it is shocking to think that we could head into fighting another pandemic threat with these issues unresolved.”
She said a pandemic agreement is about avoiding another “catastrophe like Covid-19”.
“A simple humanitarian principle says we have to do everything we can to stop history repeating itself,” Clark concluded.
Following the 2020 outbreak of Covid-19, Clark co-chaired the World Health Organisation’s Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, which delivered its primary report less than a year later.