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Historically, the WHO focused on technical, vertical, disease-specific interventions (e.g., controlling out breaks like malaria or Ebola). Current research prioritizes shifting this to "upstream" prevention, particularly through a "One Health" approach.
WHO Treaty Expansion: Mandating parties to establish surveillance systems linking veterinary, wildlife, and human health data with their stated aim of stopping diseases before they emerge.
Research Focus: Analyzing legal, intellectual property, and logistical aspects of medical countermeasures.
The Pandemic Agreement’s Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS) System, which links the sharing of pathogen data with the sharing of vaccines and medicines.
Technology Transfer: Promoting local manufacturing capacities to reduce reliance on global supply chains.
Research prioritizes the legal, financial, and infrastructural requirements for resilient, sustainable health systems that can withstand shocks without sacrificing routine care and economic stability.
A major area of research is determining the appropriate legal structure to protect national sovereignty; analyzing how "soft law" (guidelines, recommendations) have transitioned to "hard law" (binding treaties), while examining the systemic risks from a "Framework Convention + Protocol" model which creates binding obligations for key issues like data sharing, technology transfer, and financing.
Research is focused on transparent decision-making processes for declaring health emergencies, and the roles of Conference of the Parties (COP) which act as the governing body for treaties and threaten accountability.