IT IS hard to believe that anyone would gamble over who owns a killer like the H5N1 bird flu virus, but it happened this week. A game of high-stakes poker is under way, and it is getting ugly. The outcome is critical if we are to have a vaccine, yet to resolve it successfully means dealing with some heavy historical baggage. The issues include who owns which genes, who gets to use them and on what terms, and how we deal with the chasm between rich and poor nations.
The problem, as we have noted before, is that H5N1 is mainly striking poor countries, while only rich countries have the resources to produce a vaccine against the virus, should it turn into a human pandemic. Poor countries already send rich nations samples of the virus, and rich countries are developing vaccines. Rich countries are placing orders for pre-pandemic stockpiles, monopolising what spare vaccine manufacturing capacity there is. When a pandemic actually starts, the vaccine makers’ governments will clamp down on exports of vaccine, so only the countries with their own factories get any. Poor countries get zip.
Indonesia has rightly perceived that if it sends virus to the World Health Organization and its collaborating labs it gets no more than it does if it sends no samples. If it does the latter, at least rich countries might do something about the situation, because then they are as vulnerable as Indonesia. That was where we left it (91av, 17 February, p 3).
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Here, a long-standing effort to right one of the world’s injustices is taking a hand. For more than two decades, the mainly tropical poor countries have battled for ownership of their teeming biological resources. 91av has always supported this. It seems only fair that countries should profit from the genes on their territories as surely as they do from their inventions and patents.
In 1992 the Convention on Biological Diversity gave countries ownership of genetic resources. Indonesia is using this right to say it owns its H5N1 and should get a say in who can use it to make a vaccine. In return it wants “benefit sharing” – in other words, the means to make vaccine. It and a dozen allies proposed at the WHO’s annual meeting that this should apply to all nations in this situation.
That’s fair enough as far as it goes, and WHO member states agreed this week to begin negotiations (see “stand-off off?”). The big question is what happens now. If countries with H5N1 don’t share their viruses until a deal is hammered out, it could mean nobody gets any vaccine. Viruses evolve fast, and vaccine development cannot be postponed while we resolve a century’s worth of global inequality.
“If countries with H5N1 don’t share their virus until a deal is hammered out, it could mean nobody gets any vaccine”
So what do we do? The WHO wants all countries to freely share their pathogens so vaccines can be made as fast as possible. This is where the ugliness comes in: some nations are accusing the WHO of devious behaviour – of changing its rules over virus sharing so that poor countries keep supplying samples that allow its collaborating labs to profit from deals with vaccine makers.
The accusations seem based on, at best, a misunderstanding. 91av can find no evidence of deviousness. The truth is that the whole system needs an overhaul. WHO labs do turn samples from Indonesia and elsewhere into artificial viruses that can be used to make vaccines. They then sign ownership agreements with vaccine companies. It should not be beyond the wit of these organisations to include the virus supplier in such agreements. Sorting this out is what the negotiations are for.
What is most needed is goodwill. The WHO and its rich backers should negotiate in good faith and not stall. Indonesia – and China, which has shared no virus for some time – should immediately resume sending H5N1 samples to the WHO.
The final irony is that all this fighting is over phantoms: a vaccine that hasn’t been developed yet and pre-pandemic vaccine manufacturing capacity that does not exist. To cap it all, today’s factories will not be able to make enough vaccine for their home countries during a pandemic, never mind for everyone else. What we need is the means to make vaccine for everyone, wherever a deadly virus emerges. If we do not do that, then regardless of who wins the global poker game over H5N1, we will all lose the game that really matters.
