Integrating Equity Considerations in an International Pandemic Instrument
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background The COVID-19 pandemic is widely regarded as a catastrophic failure of global governance with far-reaching consequences. Actions from wealthy countries severely limited access to essential medicines and supplies for the majority of the world's population. While the World Health Assembly has established an intergovernmental negotiating body (INB) to draft an instrument to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response, and equity considerations have been positioned as central to this process, there remains a danger that international power imbalances sabotage meaningful equity action. What priorities should an equity-centred pandemic instrument reflect? Methods Using a sequential deliberative dialogue (DD) methodology, international participants were purposefully selected for expertise, life experience, and spheres of influence. Two Fall 2022 dialogues were virtually convened to coincide with the study's official representation at the INB process and participants were engaged to respond specifically to the instrument's development. Dialogue findings were synthesized with a Systematic Equity Action-Analysis1 and participants were invited to review and respond. Results Alongside specific recommendations to prevent future inequitable pandemic responses, three overarching equity-centred approaches were identified as crucial: (1) consistently align stated intentions with operational proposals; (2) openly acknowledge causes and contexts of global inequity; and (3) create mechanisms for accountability and enforcement. Conclusions Achieving equity in international instruments is possible, but vague language threatens this potential. Beyond aspirational rhetoric, deliberate and coherent equity-promoting mechanisms are needed throughout the pandemic instrument in order to avoid the next catastrophic failure of global governance. 1. Plamondon et al. Turning the tide on inequity through systematic equity action-analysis. BMC Public Health. 2023;23(1):890. Key messages • Despite a rhetoric of ‘virtuous’ equity statements by the world's power and resource-wealthy countries, global contexts of inequity will continue or worsen without mitigation. • Given future pandemics are likely, the cost of not mitigating inequities through this treaty poses risks to global public health.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.099 | 0.055 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.030 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".