Indonesia does not want money for its bird flu virus samples — it wants governments and pharmaceutical companies to come up with a mechanism that will ensure future pandemic vaccines are accessible to developing nations.
That could include creating a multilateral trust that would enable price tiering or bulk purchasing of lifesaving vaccines, an adviser to Indonesian Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari said on Wednesday.
Widjaja Lukito was responding to comments made by US Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, who accused Indonesia of withholding virus samples from the WHO since early last year because it wanted royalties or other monetary benefits.
“This is not a line we want to cross,” Leavitt said at the end of a quick stopover in Indonesia last week. “Because it means the next unique virus we come across, wherever it is, we’ll end up with people who say there is a price to pay for the virus.”
He repeated the allegation on his blog, saying Supari’s bottom line was “share samples, get paid.”
Indonesia — seen as a potential hotspot for a pandemic because of its high density of chickens and humans — denied that was the case.
Lukito said he thought there may have been poor communication on both sides.
“There are many types of benefit programs that can be discussed,” said Lukito, noting that the US and Indonesia agreed during Leavitt’s visit to set up an expert panel on the issue. “One could be a kind of revolving fund developed by pharmaceutical companies.”
Another, he said, could be to create a multilateral trust — funded by contributions from governments, influenza vaccine manufacturers and individuals — to make sure vaccines could be produced and distributed in a fair and equitable manner.
Suggestions at a WHO meeting in Geneva late last year included tiered pricing of vaccines, bulk purchasing and other procurement mechanisms that take into consideration how much governments could afford, Lukito said.
Indonesia has been hardest hit by bird flu since it began plaguing Asian poultry stocks in late 2003, with its 107 human deaths accounting for nearly half the 240 recorded fatalities worldwide. The virus remains hard for people to catch, but scientists worry it could mutate into a form that spreads easily among people, potentially sparking a pandemic that could kill millions.
Under the existing virus-sharing system, poor countries are obliged to send samples to WHO, which then makes them available to a handful of pharmaceutical companies to use in vaccine production.
Wealthy nations have stockpiled bird flu vaccines, while Indonesia and other developing countries have limited supplies.
Many international health experts say Supari had a point when she bucked WHO’s decades-old virus sharing system. But by withholding bird flu samples, health experts say, she is impeding the global body’s ability to monitor whether the virus is morphing into a more dangerous form.
Leavitt wrote in his blog on April 15 that his patience was wearing thin.
Supari was trying to put a price tag on virus samples, he said.
“We cannot be party to an arrangement that will undo 60 years of one of the world’s great public health successes,” he said.
“Linking sample-sharing to payment in any form will immediately begin to erode our ability to make vaccines at all, because once the practice of free and open sharing of viruses stops, the slope is slippery, and there will be no end to the demands,” he said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS