Who Owns the Warning? Pathogen Sharing, PABS and the One Health Governance Gap

Pathogen sharing, PABS and the One Health governance gap.

A novel pathogen is detected in an animal. A sample is collected, its genome is sequenced, and scientists recognise characteristics suggesting that the organism might pose a wider threat — a sequence that could help laboratories thousands of kilometres away develop diagnostic tests, conduct risk assessments and begin research into vaccines or therapeutics.

From the perspective of biology, the next step appears straightforward: share the information. From the perspective of global governance, almost nothing about it is.

Who has the right to use the sample? Who controls the genomic sequence? What obligations follow when a company uses that information to develop a commercial product? What does the country that detected the pathogen receive in return? What happens if it shared the information rapidly but cannot subsequently obtain the vaccine developed using it? And what happens to global surveillance if countries conclude that sharing biological information quickly leaves them worse off?

These questions sit at the centre of one of the most important developments in international biological-risk governance: the World Health Organization’s proposed Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing system, or PABS. The issue is frequently presented as a debate about access to pathogen samples and genomic information, but through a One Health lens the question is considerably larger. It concerns the architecture through which the world discovers biological threats, converts those discoveries into knowledge and products, and distributes the benefits generated by that knowledge — and at its heart lies a deceptively simple governance problem: how do we make rapid pathogen sharing and equitable benefit sharing reinforce one another rather than compete?

The Pandemic Agreement has been adopted, but PABS is unfinished

On 20 May 2025, the World Health Assembly adopted the WHO Pandemic Agreement following more than three years of negotiations initiated in response to weaknesses and inequities exposed during COVID-19. The Agreement establishes a broad framework for strengthening pandemic prevention, preparedness and response — including surveillance, research and development, health-system preparedness, supply chains and more equitable access to pandemic-related health products.

Article 12 establishes the foundation for the PABS system, whose intended purpose is to provide safe, transparent and accountable access to materials and sequence information relating to pathogens with pandemic potential while, on an equal footing, providing rapid, fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from their use. The detail, however, was deliberately left unfinished: Member States established an Intergovernmental Working Group to negotiate the PABS Annex, which must define matters including what constitutes a pathogen with pandemic potential, what materials and sequence information fall within the system, how access occurs, the legal arrangements applying to users and how benefits are shared.

Those negotiations have continued throughout 2026. Following two weeks of talks in July, WHO reported progress but confirmed that differences remained, particularly around contractual arrangements, laboratory networks and the definition and operation of the benefits generated through pathogen sharing. At the time of writing (August 2026), PABS is therefore not yet an operational global system: a further meeting of the Intergovernmental Working Group is scheduled for 14–18 September 2026, with the finalised Annex expected to be put to the World Health Assembly. It remains one of the central unresolved components of the new pandemic architecture.

Why pathogen sharing matters

Pandemic preparedness depends upon information arriving before the pandemic. When an unusual pathogen is identified, laboratories elsewhere need access to information about it: genetic sequence information can support the development of diagnostic assays, genomic surveillance, epidemiological analysis, assessment of mutations and research into vaccines and therapeutics. Physical biological material can be equally important, because researchers may need isolates to characterise a pathogen experimentally, validate diagnostics, evaluate immune responses or undertake research that sequence information alone cannot support.

Speed matters. During the early stages of an emerging outbreak, days can influence how quickly diagnostic capacity becomes available and how rapidly scientists understand what they are dealing with. From a purely technical perspective, therefore, the policy objective appears obvious — make pathogen information move as quickly as possible. The difficulty is that information does not move through a politically neutral world.

The bargain underneath PABS

The central idea behind PABS is reciprocity. Countries and laboratories that detect pathogens with pandemic potential contribute something of enormous global value — biological material and information that can enable research, surveillance and the development of medical countermeasures — and the benefits produced from those materials should therefore also be shared. Those benefits can take several forms: access to vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics, but also capacity building, technical assistance, research collaboration, technology transfer, scientific participation and monetary contributions.

The underlying principle is important: pathogen access and benefit sharing are intended to operate on an equal footing. This is not merely an ethical aspiration — it is potentially part of the incentive architecture of global surveillance. If countries believe that rapid sharing of biological discoveries results in others developing valuable products while the originating country subsequently struggles to obtain them, cooperation becomes harder to sustain. Equity and surveillance effectiveness are therefore not necessarily competing objectives; properly designed, equity can become part of surveillance infrastructure.

The pathogen may begin outside human health

This is where the One Health perspective becomes particularly important. A future pandemic pathogen does not have to announce itself first in a hospital: it might initially be identified through surveillance of poultry, pigs, livestock, wildlife, companion animals, vectors or the environment. A veterinary laboratory may therefore possess information of enormous potential importance to global human health before a human case has ever been identified.

That creates an institutional problem, because the international architecture governing human health is not identical to the architecture governing animal health, agriculture, wildlife, biodiversity or genetic resources — yet a pathogen may move through all of them. Consider a hypothetical virus detected during wildlife surveillance: at the moment of detection it may appear to be an animal-health or ecological observation; sequencing subsequently reveals characteristics that warrant further investigation; animal infections are then detected in livestock; and eventually human infections appear. At what point does the information become relevant to pandemic preparedness? Biologically, the answer may be before the first human infection. A One Health approach to PABS must therefore ensure that the system can recognise biological significance across sectors rather than waiting for a threat to enter the human-health domain.

The surveillance paradox

This creates what might be called the pathogen-sharing paradox. The global community wants countries to invest in surveillance capable of detecting unusual biological events as early as possible — but better surveillance means finding more, finding more creates information of potential international value, and sharing that information may enable research and commercial development elsewhere. If the country generating the information receives little practical benefit in return, then the countries investing most heavily in early detection can perceive themselves as providing a global public good without receiving an equivalent share of its benefits. That is not a stable surveillance model.

The objective cannot simply be detect early and share immediately. A sustainable architecture needs to be: detect early → share rapidly → generate knowledge → share benefits predictably. The final step supports the first.

Sequence information changes the old model

Historically, access and benefit-sharing debates often concentrated on physical biological materials. Genomics changes the problem: a physical sample can remain in one laboratory while its sequence travels around the world almost instantly, and once sequence information is available, researchers may be able to undertake substantial analysis without ever receiving the original material. This creates enormous benefits for preparedness — but it also complicates conventional ideas about custody and provenance.

A sample has a physical location; a digital sequence can be copied repeatedly. It can enter databases, analytical pipelines, publications, artificial-intelligence systems and commercial research programmes, and derived information can subsequently be incorporated into further datasets and products. The governance question therefore becomes less about possession of an object and more about maintaining the relationships between the biological material, the sequence derived from it, the institution and country that generated it, subsequent users, the knowledge derived from it, and the benefits arising from that use. That is fundamentally a provenance problem.

The danger of making sharing too difficult

There is an important counterargument: if benefit-sharing requirements become excessively complicated, pathogen sharing could slow down. A laboratory confronted with a novel pathogen should not need lawyers to determine whether it can upload a sequence while an outbreak is accelerating. Researchers need clarity about what information they can access and what obligations attach to its use; databases need workable rules; and manufacturers need sufficient certainty to begin development rapidly.

This creates a genuine policy tension. A system designed entirely around frictionless access could reproduce inequities; a system designed entirely around controlling downstream use could introduce precisely the friction that pandemic surveillance is intended to remove. The challenge for PABS is therefore not choosing between speed and equity, but designing the architecture so that laboratories do not have to negotiate equity every time they share a pathogen. Benefit sharing needs to be sufficiently predetermined that biological information can move rapidly because the rules governing its subsequent use are already understood.

From permission to infrastructure

This suggests a different way of thinking about PABS. It should not primarily operate as a transaction — Can I use this pathogen? — but as infrastructure: this pathogen enters a trusted system within which access, attribution, use and benefit-sharing rules are already established.

That distinction could be extremely important. If laboratories know how material should be deposited, databases know how sequence information should be labelled, researchers know what obligations accompany access, and manufacturers know what benefit-sharing arrangements apply before an emergency occurs, considerably less negotiation is required during the emergency itself. The best pandemic agreement is one whose difficult governance decisions have already been made before the pathogen arrives.

Provenance without restricting science

PABS also raises a problem increasingly familiar across biological research: how do we maintain provenance without unnecessarily restricting access? A pathogen sample generates a sequence; that sequence may generate an assembly, annotation or phylogenetic analysis; it may contribute to a diagnostic target; researchers may compare it with thousands of other sequences; and a manufacturer may eventually use knowledge derived from those analyses during the development of a vaccine or therapeutic.

Not every downstream relationship will be simple. Trying to determine ownership of every scientific idea derived from a sequence would rapidly become unworkable; but abandoning provenance altogether creates the opposite problem, because the contribution made by countries, laboratories and surveillance systems can disappear as information travels downstream. A workable system therefore needs persistent attribution without requiring every scientific transformation to become a bilateral negotiation: provenance should travel with the information even when permission does not have to be renegotiated at every step.

A One Health provenance layer

From a One Health Security perspective, this suggests that PABS should eventually support a persistent provenance architecture. Imagine a novel virus identified in a wildlife sample: the system could preserve a chain such as wildlife surveillance event → animal → sample → isolate → genomic sequence → database accession → research use → derived knowledge → countermeasure development, with metadata identifying the originating laboratory and country while appropriate governance rules determine which downstream activities generate benefit-sharing obligations.

This does not mean putting every laboratory notebook onto a global blockchain or creating a central database tracking every scientist. It means maintaining sufficient machine-readable provenance to preserve the relationship between biological discovery and downstream utilisation — an architecture that could make benefit sharing more practical precisely because it would reduce the need to reconstruct provenance retrospectively.

The One Health governance gap

The deeper problem exposed by PABS is that global biological surveillance remains institutionally fragmented. Human health, animal health, agriculture, biodiversity, environmental surveillance, research databases, pharmaceutical development and international trade operate through overlapping but different governance arrangements. A virus moving between a bat, a farmed animal and a human does not encounter those boundaries. Its data does. That is the One Health governance gap.

The solution cannot simply be to place every biological activity under WHO: the Pandemic Agreement explicitly respects national sovereignty, and other international organisations possess responsibilities and expertise that should not be displaced. What is required is interoperability between governance systems. WHO, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Organisation for Animal Health and the United Nations Environment Programme already collaborate through the Quadripartite One Health framework, and PABS provides an opportunity to make the same principle operational for pathogen information. A pathogen detected through an animal-health system should not become globally relevant only after it becomes a human-health emergency.

What should a One Health PABS system contain?

Several principles follow.

First, eligibility should be based upon biological risk rather than the institutional location of detection. A pathogen with credible pandemic potential should be capable of entering the relevant system whether it was discovered through human, veterinary, wildlife or environmental surveillance.

Second, provenance should begin at detection. Biological materials and sequence information should retain persistent attribution to the laboratories, surveillance systems and countries that generated them.

Third, sharing rules should be predetermined, so that laboratories can share rapidly without negotiating access arrangements during an emerging crisis.

Fourth, benefit sharing should be predictable: countries should know in advance what participation in the system can reasonably provide if shared materials or information contribute to pandemic products.

Fifth, scientific participation should itself be recognised as a benefit. Researchers and laboratories generating early surveillance information should not simply become sample providers; meaningful participation in analysis, research and publication strengthens global scientific capacity.

Sixth, capacity building should reinforce detection. Benefit sharing that strengthens laboratory, genomic, veterinary and epidemiological capacity creates a positive feedback loop, in which countries receiving benefits become better able to detect the next threat. This last point is particularly important, because the most valuable benefit of PABS may ultimately be a world in which more countries can recognise the next dangerous pathogen earlier.

Benefit sharing as preparedness investment

This changes how benefit sharing should be understood. It is tempting to frame it as redistribution after a profitable product has been created — and some of it undoubtedly concerns access to products and economic value — but a One Health approach reveals another possibility: benefit sharing can finance the infrastructure that generates future warnings. Laboratory equipment, sequencing capacity, veterinary surveillance, epidemiological expertise, sample-transport systems, bioinformatics capability and workforce development all increase the probability that unusual biological events will be recognised early.

Benefit sharing can therefore create a feedback loop: surveillance → pathogen sharing → countermeasure development → benefit sharing → stronger surveillance. That is a much more powerful model than treating benefit sharing simply as compensation for supplying biological material. It turns equity into preparedness infrastructure.

Trust is part of biosecurity

There is another connection with One Health Security: pathogen sharing ultimately depends upon trust. Countries must trust that sharing a pathogen will not leave them excluded from the products subsequently developed from it; scientists need confidence that their contributions will be recognised; manufacturers need confidence that obligations are understandable and workable; databases need confidence that they can provide rapid scientific access while operating within agreed rules; and public-health institutions need confidence that biological information will move quickly enough to support emergency response.

Trust in this context is not a soft diplomatic aspiration. It affects whether information moves — and that makes it part of biosecurity infrastructure. A technically perfect surveillance system that countries are reluctant to use is not an effective surveillance system.

The real test will come before the next pandemic

The negotiations over the PABS Annex may appear highly technical. Definitions, contractual mechanisms, database requirements, laboratory networks and benefit-sharing obligations rarely produce dramatic headlines — yet these details will determine how one of the most important information systems in future pandemic preparedness actually works.

The real test will not be whether Member States can produce elegant treaty language. It will come when a laboratory somewhere identifies something unusual — perhaps in a hospital patient, perhaps in poultry, pigs or wildlife, perhaps in wastewater or another environmental sample. Someone will sequence it. Someone will recognise that it might matter. And at that moment the global system needs that person and that country to share what they know quickly.

For that to happen reliably, sharing cannot depend solely upon appeals to solidarity during a crisis. The governance architecture has to make cooperation rational before the crisis begins. That is why PABS matters to One Health: it is not simply a mechanism for exchanging pathogen samples, but an attempt to govern the relationship between detection, data, science, sovereignty, commercial value and global public goods.

If it works, the benefit will not merely be fairer access to the products developed during the next pandemic. It may help create a world in which the warning arrives sooner. And in pandemic preparedness, time is one of the most valuable benefits we can share.

Related One Health Security analysis

This briefing connects to When Surveillance Systems Connect but Institutions Do Not, on the institutional side of One Health data, and to Trust Is Biosecurity Infrastructure, on why cooperation is itself a preparedness capability.

References

1. World Health Organization (2025). World Health Assembly adopts historic Pandemic Agreement to make the world more equitable and safer from future pandemics. 20 May 2025.
2. World Health Organization (2025). WHO Pandemic Agreement, adopted by the Seventy-eighth World Health Assembly, Resolution WHA78.1, 20 May 2025.
3. World Health Organization. Pandemic prevention, preparedness and response agreement: questions and answers.
4. World Health Organization (2026). WHO Member States agree to extend negotiations on Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing annex. 1 May 2026.
5. World Health Organization (2026). WHO Member States continue negotiations on the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing Annex. 20 July 2026.
6. World Health Organization. WHO Pandemic Agreement and the Intergovernmental Working Group (IGWG).