When Indonesia’s health minister stopped sending samples of bird flu virus to a research laboratory in the US for fear Washington could use them to make biological weapons, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates laughed and called it “the nuttiest thing” he’d ever heard.
Yet deep inside an 86-page supplement to US export regulations is a single sentence that bars US exports of vaccines for avian bird flu and dozens of other viruses to five countries designated “state sponsors of terrorism.”
The reason is fear that they will be used for biological warfare.
Under this little-known policy, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Syria and Sudan may not get the vaccines unless they apply for special export licenses, which would be given or refused according to the discretion and timing of the US.
The regulations, which cover vaccines for everything from dengue fever to the Ebola virus, have raised concern within the medical and scientific communities. Although they were quietly put in place more than a decade ago, they could now be more relevant because of concerns about bird flu.
Officials from the US Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said they were not even aware of the policies until contacted by reporters last month and privately expressed alarm.
They make “no scientific sense,” said Peter Palese, chairman of the microbiology department at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.
He said the bird flu vaccine, for example, can be used to contain outbreaks in poultry before they mutate to a form spread more easily between people.
“The more vaccines out there, the better,” he said. “It’s a matter of protecting ourselves, really, so the bird flu virus doesn’t take hold in these countries and spread.”
Some experts said the idea of using vaccines as biological weapons is far-fetched, and that in a health emergency, it is unclear how quickly authorities could cut through the red tape to get the vaccines distributed.
Under normal circumstances it would take at least six weeks to approve export licenses for any vaccine on the list, said Thomas Monath, who formerly headed a CIA advisory group on ways to counter biological attacks.
That could make it harder to contain an outbreak of bird flu among chickens in, say, North Korea, which is in the region hardest hit by the virus.
The danger of biological warfare use depends on the specific virus or bacteria. But most experts agree that bird flu vaccines cannot be genetically altered to create weapons because they contain an inactivated virus that cannot be resuscitated.
It’s also unlikely they would be used to create a resistant strain of the virus as part of efforts to wreak havoc within global poultry stocks.
“I can think of no scientific reason how a terrorist organization could use such a vaccine for malicious intent,” he said. “I personally think it’s a rather silly attitude and the US is probably going overboard as it has in the past with many of its bioterrorism initiatives.”
Meanwhile, bioethicists say limiting vaccines could also raise moral questions of whether some countries should be denied because of decisions based on foreign policy. They said the export controls appear inconsistent, as Libya, Iraq and two dozen other countries suspected by the US of having biological weapons programs do not face restrictions on the export of poultry vaccines.
“If there really is a serious threat, to be consistent we’d have to more heavily regulate who has access to the vaccine,” said Michael Selgelid, who co-authored the book Ethical and Philosophical Consideration of the Dual Use Dilemma in the Biological Sciences.
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