Plague risks in Russia and a dangerous delay on WHO pandemic agreement

Responding to an editorial on a potential plague outbreak, Dr Darren Mann deplores delays to the agreement, while Kent Buse says Britain could do more

Your editorial on the silence from Siberia after a worker died at a plague research institute there is right that the lack of information is the real worry (The Guardian view on plague in Russia: what is most worrying is the lack of information, 18 October). But the deeper failure is not Russian. It is that, six years after Covid, we still have no agreed system for sharing pathogens, or for sharing what is made from them.

I spent three decades in Hong Kong, through bird flu, Sars and Covid, working on outbreak surveillance and sample-sharing between Hong Kong and the UK. It is also where this territorial argument began. In June 1894, two bacteriologists arrived to investigate the plague. Kitasato Shibasaburō was given lab space and immediate access to the bodies. Alexandre Yersin was refused access to the dead, and worked from a straw hut, having to appeal to the governor for his share of cadavers. Access to the material was allocated by favour, not by need. The organism carries the name of the man who was shut out: Yersinia pestis.

The pathogen access and benefit-sharing annexe to the World Health Organization pandemic agreement is the same argument in modern dress, and it has stalled on the same point. Poorer countries are asked to detect and share dangerous pathogens quickly. In return, they want a binding guarantee of what follows: 20% of real-time production of vaccines and treatments, half donated and half sold at cost. In article 13, the global supply chain and logistics network provides for a more equitable distribution of personal protective equipment. Richer countries prefer all that sharing to stay voluntary. The agreement cannot open for signature until this is settled, and it has now been deferred to 2027.

All pandemics start with a rumour. The next pandemic is likely to be something we have never seen before, and whoever first holds the samples will not be us. If we cannot agree what they get in return, we should not be surprised when they are slow to hand them over. Dr Darren Mann Former medical director, Cabinet Office Covid-19 PPE taskforce

Your editorial on plague in Russia is right that the system is fraying, but wrong to treat Moscow’s silence as an aberration. It is the predictable product of rules that member states built without teeth. The International Health Regulations oblige governments to notify the WHO within 24 hours, yet provide no verification, no sanctions and no independent monitoring. States mark their own homework through annual self-assessments. The amendments in force since last September add an implementation committee that is, by design, consultative only. Member states, Britain included, chose this. They then starved the WHO of assessed funding, leaving it dependent on the goodwill of the governments it is meant to hold to account.

Britain accepted the amended regulations in July 2025 and, with the United States gone, is among the WHO’s largest government funders. Ministers should raise Russia’s non-reporting formally within the WHO rather than leave Washington to make the only public request. The UK should table proposals for independent verification and a public compliance register when the pandemic agreement’s pathogen-sharing annex returns to the assembly, due by May 2027. And it should volunteer for the WHO’s Universal Health and Preparedness Review, a peer review that only 11 countries have joined and Britain has not. A government cannot demand transparency it declines to practise. The recent UN declaration on pandemics will mean little unless the governments that signed it are held to account. Kent Buse Co-CEO, Global 50/50