The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare a crucial truth that global health emergencies cannot be contained within national borders (Davies and Wenham 2020; Regilme and Parthenay 2024; Regilme 2020a; 2023; Regilme 2024; Regilme 2020b; FitzGerald 2024). Pathogens move faster than diplomatic negotiations, and their social and political consequences outpace slow, fragmented governance. In the face of such a shared existential threat, the world urgently needs robust international cooperation rooted in human rights, equity, and solidarity. Yet a close reading of the ongoing WHO pandemic treaty negotiations reveals a troubling reality: instead of building a future-ready system of global collective action, the process is reinforcing an outdated prioritization of sovereign state interests at the expense of global public health (Anderson, Fenton, and Crump 2025) .

The initial drafts of the pandemic treaty articulated a cosmopolitan ethic, acknowledging the intrinsic moral value of all individuals irrespective of nationality and establishing obligations towards the global collective welfare (Anderson, Fenton, and Crump 2025) . These drafts underscored principles such as universal health coverage (UHC), the “One Health” approach (which integrates human, animal, and environmental health), community engagement, and inclusiveness. Collectively, these elements envisioned a comprehensive, multi-sectoral, and genuinely cooperative model for pandemic preparedness. However, subsequent revisions of the treaty have diluted these commitments. The provisions for UHC and One Health were significantly weakened; community engagement and inclusiveness were omitted; and human rights protections were consolidated and stripped of specificity. Concurrently, state sovereignty was elevated to the treaty’s foundational principle.

This shift represents more than a mere technical drafting adjustment; it exemplifies what scholars refer to as ethical amnesia (Anderson, Fenton, and Crump 2025) : the gradual abandonment of principled commitments to justice and solidarity when political expediency dictates otherwise. During the most severe phases of COVID-19, world leaders employed the rhetoric of global cooperation, pledging that the failures of vaccine nationalism, resource hoarding, and fragmented crisis responses would not recur. However, as the acute sense of crisis diminished, so too did the willingness to embed binding ethical obligations into new institutional frameworks.

The risks associated with this retreat are neither hypothetical nor remote. The COVID-19 crisis has already demonstrated how self-serving state actions have exacerbated the situation (Surianta and Dressel 2025; Soulé 2022; Zhang and Jamali 2022; Han, Millar, and Bayly 2021) . In 2020 and 2021, affluent nations secured substantial vaccine supplies through advance purchase agreements, effectively excluding much of the Global South. This vaccine inequity, described by UN Secretary-General António Guterres as “the biggest moral failure of our times,” extended the pandemic, facilitated the emergence of new variants, and resulted in numerous fatalities. Indeed, vaccine nationalism not only failed to protect domestic populations in the long........

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