The World Health Assembly, meeting this week in Geneva, Switzerland, thought it would be unveiling a new pandemic treaty for members to approve. Instead, negotiations stalled over fundamental disagreements involving intellectual-property rights, privileged access to pandemic-related materials such as vaccines, and World Health Organization control over pandemic-related materials.

WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus characterized this as a tragic missed opportunity. In truth, it’s a welcome opportunity for resetting a process that veered badly off track.

After COVID-19 swept the globe, killing millions and costing trillions of dollars, world leaders called for a legally binding agreement to apply the lessons of the pandemic. Those lessons seemed clear enough—that to prevent and respond to future outbreaks, the nations of the world needed to act more promptly, transparently, and cooperatively in alerting governments worldwide about a potential outbreak and sharing critical genomic data and other details.

Indeed, the faster the world detects and reacts to new and dangerous pathogens, the faster those pathogens can be defeated, and the more likely it is that a pandemic can be quashed before it starts.

>>> The WHO Pandemic Treaty Fails Again

If China had acted transparently and responsibly, as it had already pledged to do long before the COVID-19 outbreak, the pandemic would probably not have inflicted as much damage. Instead, China was opaque and obstructive in the early weeks of the outbreak. It still refuses to cooperate with efforts to clarify the origins of the disease.