Lloyd Mulenga, M.B.Ch.B., Ph.D., on Zambia’s MOU talks | AIDS 2026

Zambia has not yet signed a bilateral health memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the United States, and the remaining sticking points center on data and specimen sharing rather than mineral access, according to Lloyd Mulenga, M.B. Ch.B., Ph.D., director of infectious diseases at the Zambia Ministry of Health. The MOUs, negotiated under the Trump administration's America First Global Health Strategy, are intended to replace U.S. foreign assistance with jointly financed health agreements. According to ThinkGlobalHealth, a global health news website, 33 countries have signed MOUs, but Zambia is among the countries still negotiating.

Mulenga was a featured speaker at AIDS 2026, the 26^th International AIDS Conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which is concluding today. Managed Healthcare Executive (MHE) interviewed Mulenga via Zoom before the meeting.

Mulenga said he was aware of negotiations concerning mineral rights but

that his involvement in MOU negotiation was limited to the health MOU, which he described as having three parts: a core health agreement, a data-sharing component, and a specimen-sharing component.

Under the data-sharing terms, Zambia would provide the United States with program and performance-based health data, Mulenga said, a process that has required weighing the country's autonomy and its own data laws against U.S. requests. Specimen sharing, he said, raises similar sensitivities given the biological material involved. Central to both negotiations, according to Mulenga, is what Zambia receives in return: whether the country would gain access to any vaccines or drugs developed from specimens collected domestically and how intellectual property rights over such products would be handled. He said comparable questions have surfaced in broader discussions at the World Health Organization.

“What are the benefits to the country for specimen sharing? If we share the specimens, what will be the benefits? If vaccines are developed from the specimens shared from Zambia, will Zambia have access to those? So those are I think those are the thorny issues” Mulenga said in his interview with MHE.