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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS