The global experience with the COVID-19 pandemic taught us that no person is safe in our world until everyone is. Delivering global safety in the form of global health is only possible through global solidarity and purposeful collaboration. In this world, the question is not whether a new pandemic threat will emerge, but when — and there is no excuse for us not to be ready.

Since 2021, the World Health Organization’s 194 member countries have been negotiating a new international pandemic instrument which could move our world toward greater justice and safety for all.

As a pioneering voice in global health equity, our colleague, Professor Larry Gostin, has worked alongside nations and leaders to advocate for a pandemic accord which delivers on these promises. Together, we have advocated for meaningful governance reform which moves us toward health justice — and specifically, towards reform which would create real and binding accountability in the face of another global health crisis.

The new accord (together with the revised International Health Regulations) should ultimately set the international rules for collaboration to prevent and respond to pandemic threats. We need clear and effective rules which guarantee, rather than nudge, toward equity.

Over the last three years, Larry Gostin, I, and many others have urged world leaders to open their minds toward specific subsets of reform in the interest of pandemic response, including mechanisms for transparency, accountability, and, crucially, financial buy-in. With negotiations for a new pandemic accord still incomplete, our focus must remain on reaching global agreement and keeping at top of mind the immense stakes if that is not possible.

In the best-case scenario, a new legal instrument and a revised version of global health governance could deliver vast and universally shared benefits, including greater capacity to detect new and dangerous pathogens, access to information about pathogens detected elsewhere in the world, and the timely and equitable delivery of tests, treatments, vaccines, and other lifesaving tools. In the worst-case scenario, we are left with a world that is inexcusably unprepared for our next global health emergency and repeats a cycle of devastating and inequitable loss.

Professor Gostin and I share a view that this post-pandemic negotiation era marks a unique inflection point for global health. If we make the right choices and collaborate toward meaningful reform, developing real mechanisms for equity and new partnerships in global health, we have the opportunity to bring to bear a new governance structure which can truly advance the right to health and human rights more broadly, creating a fairer and more just world for all.

With global solidarity and collaboration, we have the tools to move our world toward true health justice and make the COVID-19 pandemic the last pandemic of such immense devastation.