The WHO Pandemic Agreement’s Missing Epistemic Architectures: Infodemics and Antimicrobial Resistance as Examples

TL;DR

The WHO Pandemic Agreement focuses on equity but overlooks the need for fair knowledge systems, using infodemics and AMR as examples.

Contribution

The paper highlights the missing focus on epistemic justice in the Pandemic Agreement and suggests ways to address it.

Findings

The Pandemic Agreement narrowly defines equity, missing epistemic justice.

Infodemics and AMR require clear epistemic architectures for effective global responses.

The PA could integrate diverse normative frameworks to achieve epistemic justice.

Abstract

On 20 May 2025, the 78th World Health Assembly adopted the World Health Organization’s Pandemic Agreement (PA). With the benefit of lessons learnt from the COVID-19 pandemic, the PA rightly focuses on advancing equity, but we are concerned that the PA appears to apply equity narrowly as distributive justice and neglects epistemic justice. Using infodemics and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as examples, we argue that the PA misses epistemic architectures. We first explain why infodemics are an important public health concern that the PA seeks to address, even though it does not clearly mention them. We then explain why equity must be interpreted to include epistemic justice. Using infodemics as an example, we subsequently discuss how the epistemic architecture of the PA on infodemics will need to be set out clearly as an annex to the PA or through the adoption of an additional protocol. We note in particular that the PA could help to draw together different normative and human rights approaches and frameworks to meet the requirements of epistemic justice. A similar challenge applies to AMR as an epistemically complex phenomenon, and our argument is that a global response to AMR will require a just and equitable epistemic architecture that the PA could lay the foundation for.