South Africa-based scientist Tulio de Oliveira saw that a country was hit with travel bans after he alert the world to the new and highly transmissible Omicron variant of the sars-coV-2 virus.
He was smart at what he saw as wealthier nations storing vaccines, antiviral drugs and test reagents.
The World Health Organization is grappling with the question of when to call it over, and some countries, including the UK, have already done so.
How do we respond to the next outbreak?
Ensuring vaccine equity is one of the main challenges.
These are linked. For the first time in the history of the Pandemic, legal.
It used to be that living organisms, including pathogens, were considered common heritage and sharing them for scientific purposes was informal.
The UN's 1992 convention on biological diversity states that countries have rights over genetic resources found on their territory.
The host country can set terms for accessing those resources and ensure fair and equitable sharing of benefits under the Nagoya protocol.
The spirit of the protocol has not been respected since Nagoya entered into force. In January 2020, China will be the first country to share data related to sars-coV-2 with other countries.
The data has led to revolutions in vaccinology. The fruits of those revolutions have not been shared equally.
Only a small percentage of people in low-income countries have received at least one vaccine dose.
Two Europe-based hubs for the international sharing of pathogen data and samples are one of the initiatives proposed by the WHO. The proposals effectively ignore Nagoya.
The WHO expects countries to contribute to the hubs for the common good. None of the current proposals explicitly address benefit-sharing, despite the fact that it has been vocal about the need for vaccine equity.
We're not treating vaccines and medical countermeasures as a common good, but we are treating pathogen-sharing as a common good.
Human pathogens should be excluded from Nagoya and vaccines should be reclassified.
The WHO is working on a treaty that would apportion intellectual property rights according to the ratio of public-private investment in vaccine development.
The public bore most of the risk and the drug companies maintained most of the intellectual property when it came to the three or four leading coronaviruses vaccines.
He says that more of the intellectual property should stay in the public domain. Private-sector claims that reducing their intellectual property dominance would diminish innovation do not hold up, and the example of antiretroviral drugs for HIV is the subject of an earlier intellectual property battle.
Incentives for HIV research in the rich countries have not been affected by the fact of generic production in the global south.
He admits that changing the status quo via a new treaty may not be easy without government backing, and that the UK and EU may oppose it. He says that sharing knowhow and building up vaccine manufacturing capacity are vital for achieving vaccine equity.
The solution may be to leave Nagoya and respect its insistence on equitable benefit-sharing.
Edward Hammond, a Texas-based consultant who has advised low- and middle-income countries on the implications of Nagoya, says there is a precedent. He points to a successful implementation of Nagoya in the WHO's own framework.
It has generated over $250m in cash payments from vaccine companies.
It is thought that applying to Nagoya would create delays in sharing and give control to bad actors.
Drug companies are not the only ones expressing that view. Some in public health share it. Three years ago, Vasee Moorthy, a senior science adviser at the WHO, worked on a study into the impact of Nagoya on public health.
The study found that the protocol encourages pathogen-sharing by building trust that benefits will be fairly shared. Sharing is in everyone's interests.
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He says that containment measures should be balanced with financial or other support.
Nagoya is not perfect. He and others are lobbying to change that, because it only covers physical samples, not the digital sequence data that is needed to make vaccines, tests and drugs.
It embraces the spirit of the era with its accent on reciprocity. It allows for benefit sharing. He thinks it could have mitigated vaccine nationalism.
The model for a better instrument that covers many pathogens could be provided by PIP.
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