Should Big Pharma pay poor countries for finding new diseases?

The Covid-19 pandemic revealed that, in a global health emergency, all the aspirational rhetoric about international cooperation didn’t mean much. Once groundbreaking Covid-19 vaccines became available a year into the pandemic, rich countries looked out for themselves and poorer countries were largely left behind.

That brought recriminations, but also a pledge from the world’s nations to learn from those mistakes and create a better playbook for when a future pathogen inevitably threatens the world. So at the end of 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the global community would negotiate a pandemic treaty to set the rules...