Members of the World Health Organization came together on a critical agreement Tuesday that outlines how members would react to pandemics after the COVID-19 outbreak.

COVID-19 has killed over 7 million people, according to the WHO, including over 1.2 million people in the United States.

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The agreement was adopted after three years of negotiations, and its passage was welcomed with applause.

“The agreement is a victory for public health, science and multilateral action. It will ensure we, collectively, can better protect the world from future pandemic threats,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

The agreement “boosts global collaboration to ensure stronger, more equitable response to future pandemics.” Slovakia, whose prime minister has expressed skepticism about the safety of and adequacy of testing for COVID-19 vaccines, called for a vote to challenge the agreement.

But 124 countries voted in favor of the agreement, no countries voted against, and 11 countries, including Poland, Israel, Italy, Russia, Slovakia, and Iran, abstained. Top WHO officials say the agreement will help the nations learn from COVID-19 and move forward.

“Now that the Agreement has been brought to life, we must all act with the same urgency to implement its critical elements, including systems to ensure equitable access to life-saving pandemic-related health products,” said Dr. Teodoro Herbosa, secretary of the Philippines’s Department of Health and president of this year’s World Health Assembly. “As COVID was a once-in-a-lifetime emergency, the WHO Pandemic Agreement offers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build on lessons learned from that crisis and ensure people worldwide are better protected if a future pandemic emerges.”

President Donald Trump signed an executive order pulling the U.S. out of the WHO in January, as he did in his first term before former President Joe Biden reversed his order. Trump wrote that he made the decision because of “the organization’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China, and other global health crises, its failure to adopt urgently needed reforms, and its inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO member states.”

He also cited that the WHO demands “unfairly onerous payments from the United States, far out of proportion with other countries’ assessed payments,” and that China contributes much less despite having a larger population.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explained the U.S. decision to pull out of the organization in video remarks that aired at the assembly.

“Global cooperation on health is still critically important to President Trump and myself, but it isn’t working very well under the WHO as the failures of the COVID era demonstrate,” Kennedy said in comments shared with the Washington Examiner. “I urge the world’s health ministers and the WHO to take our withdrawal from the organization as a wake-up call.”

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The U.S. did not appear at the WHO assembly in Geneva, Switzerland. The organization, which has drawn about a fifth of its funding from the U.S., still lists the U.S. as a member country on its website.

“It’s very sad that the U.S. is no longer within the group of countries who want to help make the world a better place,” Barbara Stocking of Britain, the chairwoman of the Panel for a Global Public Health Convention, told NPR.