The thread that Indonesia pulled when it demanded certain rights to vaccines made from a seed virus isolated within its national borders is threatening to unravel the fabric of the half century seasonal influenza surveillance system. At the core of the dispute is the question of whether there is such a thing as an intellectual property right over a virus, a part of a virus or a viral gene:
During the recently concluded World Health Assembly - the annual meeting of the WHO's 193 member states - it became clear some countries are keen to explore whether they have intellectual property rights to viruses circulating within their borders and if those rights exist, what benefits might flow from them.[snip]
Such discussions bring into play complex and potentially science-slowing issues like the possible demand for royalties and whether the protections offered countries under the International Convention on Biodiversity extend to viruses.
"We don't believe it is applicable," Dr. David Heymann, the WHO's senior official for pandemic influenza, says of the convention.
Heymann admits, though, that the WHO needs to study the issue to see why Indonesia and some of its supporters believe the convention does give countries rights over viruses.
[snip]
[Dr. Angus Nicoll of the European Centre for Disease Control] says he hopes the review doesn't focus on claims of ownership, using an example to illustrate what a quagmire a system of virus ownership could create.
In the scenario he cites, a woman from country X is infected through contact with a goose. She travels to country Y, where she dies. A specimen from her lungs is sent to country Z, where a laboratory isolates a virus.
Who owns the virus? The lab in country Z? The hospital in country Y? Her survivors or the government of country X? The man who owned the goose?
"It is important concept to get away from, the dead end of: Whose virus is it anyway?" Nicoll warns. (Helen Branswell, Canadian Press)
Yes, well. If I may be so bold, the advanced nations and their scientists are reaping the whirlwind of an intellectual property system they helped institute or acquiesced to. As long as we make vital drugs poor nations need but can't afford because multinational companies, whose interests our governments cater to, demand obeisance to intellectual property rights, that's fine. Intellectual property in the service of innovation. The moment the same market rationale withholds something vital to us, then it's dangerous, immoral and science-slowing. I guess the goose's sauce doesn't taste that good when it adorns the gander.
The idea that Indonesia has a property right to a virus is ridiculous and problematic on its face and serious in its consequences. Just like a lot of intellectual property law, designed by and for the convenience and profit of the property "owners." Too many scientists and their institutions have become complicit in this system, as they meekly allowed licensing or patenting discoveries they made for the sheer joy of discovery or the desire to make the world better. Now flu scientists are finding it is coming back to bite them.
Time for scientists to stand up and persuade by example: open access to their publications (they can reserve the right to distribute it to colleagues and deposit immediately in PubCentral); their products put under public or share-and-share alike licenses, refusing to participate in their institution's complicity with a bad system (this is possible; all they need to do is do it. They will not be punished for it, no matter what their university says); and they need to speak publicly that science knowledge is to be shared, not put under the burden of access only by permission.
The current virus sharing problem is a symptom of a chronic disease in science. Time for radical surgery.
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How about letting Indonesia (or wherever) have property rights to viruses isolated from cases within their borders... Right after they prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they can contain those viruses within those self-same borders?
I can think of other absurdities:
There is an outbreak in country X, later in country Y.
Vaccine is produced from strain Z isolated earlier from
a dead bird swimming in international waters.
Y is closer related to Z than X, all are very close.
----------------------
vaccine is produced from the Norfolk-strain.
Hungary claims it's their virus...
----------------------
vaccine is usually a reassortant with genes from
PR/8/34. Now Puerto Rico claims for royalties from
all future vaccines, payable to the successors
of the government from 1934
-----------------------
...
Where is Indonesia getting all of the Tamiflu from or have they decided to develop amnesia? Maybe WHO should withhold further shipments for a week or two.
Great idea, Rodgers. And during that week without Tamiflu maybe the virus will get a chance to start circulating among humans because it isn't getting the legs cut out from under it upon its first toe-hold.
To akin to Russian Roulette to be practical.
Or Indonesia could decide that there's little point in doing the legwork for vaccines that are never going to benefit them at all, scrap that cost and put the money to mitigate the (inevitable) effect of a large-scale epidemic instead. Or, you know, try to make their own vaccine. Chances not too good? Sure - but more likely to give them some vaccine than hoping that the first-world will actually selflessly share limited supplies rather than just vaccine their own populations.
I can frankly not fault them too much for doing this. Remember, parts of the industrialized world have fought tooth and nail the copying of AIDS drugs and other medications since a few million deaths isn't serious enough - but the US happily did the same for anthrax drugs after half a dozen deaths.
In English we call this a "dog in the manger" strategy. I agree with you on one thing. The West is getting what it deserves on the intellectual property front. But most of us ordinary peopole in Indon or in the West don't deserve it.
Revere: The problem seems to be that if we start advocating a "no-IP" policy amongst the scientific community then two things happen:
1) Big Pharma refuses to produce material that exists under a CC share-alike license, because they won't be able to pay back their investment on the Phase 2 and 3 trials that are mandated by drug regulators. Hence good work never gets to the people who need it (because governments aren't going to pay you to do a large scale randomised clinical trial).
2) The developing world gets screwed by pharmaceutical companies who bioprospect and refuse to CC their discoveries. Remembering that the US isn't party to the Biodiversity convention (surprise!) and thus neither is Big Pharma.
Some form of IP is neccessary - the question is what caveats can you build into it.
abolish all IP, form an international agency instead,
which estimates the value of new inventions and discoveries
and pays for it from member=tax money.
Saying it is intellectual property is too simple. The advanced nations and their scientists are reaping the whirlwind of an inequitable global system in which greed and acquiescence in an organizing principle of "the war of all against all" threaten planetary survival.
I can only say that I would send them the bill for the destruction of the worlds economy, deaths of millions, loss of revenue for their intellectual property getting friggin' loose. Kind of like what would happen if a BSL-4 lab had security breach and someone grabbed something like Ebola. That applies to China too.
It also under the current UN charter constitutes a security issue for the countries of the world. Those countries could act multi-laterally or uni-laterally to protect those security interests without UN Security Council approval.
Indon screws around much more then you are going to hear the rhetoric crank up. If and when it breaks the rhetoric could go silent and those countries might act. An act in this particular stage could be a bright blinding flash followed by even the bacteria in the soil being neutralized. We come full circle now folks. I am hearing a lot of pissed off people talking about sanctions in the face of a pandemic. If those sanctions are imposed and dont work, then they will try something else. The world is talking about revamping something now, why didnt they do it before it hit? Someone get back to me on that.
As I see it: 1. Guarantee them vaccine that doesnt exist. Okay, Why not? If it comes out six months after it begins, who is going to be in Indonesia to take it. Who is going to be around to buy it and take it or administer it? 2. Impose economic sanctions.... Uh-anyone seen that guy Hussein? That really worked well for us and it ended up in a war in Iraq. 3. Military intervention. This one bothers me because there are so many countries with so many toys. Conventional forces? Not likely. Send them in to get sick? Chemical weapons? Maybe, but to kill the bug you would have to poison the earth for about 50 years and that has a way of coming back on you. But it would stop it. Persistent agents are and have been around since before the turn of the previous century. Nukes? Covered before and the types, but that is a BIG step. The latter two options of this part are a possibility. NO, I am not suggesting that they do. But any good National Security Advisor be it Russian, US, UK, France, China is going to keep their options open.
I hope that Indon really truly understands what could happen if it gets loose and the governments lose control of the population. The possibilities are endless and geared by the supplies, the power, the politics, the vaccine, the use of, the sale of, the free giving of, the lack of and on and on.
Lets hope we dont get into a mess we cant get out of. Indon should just give it up without recourse, else they withold at the peril of their populace. They can argue later, but on this one they have only an ambiguous amount of time. It could happen tommorow.
What ever happened to the principle that you cannot patent a naturally occurring organism or part of a naturally occurring organism?
In my opinion any genetic sequences coming from a plant or animal should be public domain and put in publicly accessible databases. The areas that can be patented should be processes for discovering and for altering those sequences, or uses for those sequences which are different from their natural function.
So, for example, if you invent a handy-dandy splice-site sequence, even if that sequence can occur by chance in nature, if its purpose in nature is not as a splice-site, then you can patent it. If you steal DNA for domains from 2 or 3 or 5 proteins, splice them together, and come up with a protein whose properties differ from the source proteins, then you can patent that.
But you can't just take the gene for H5 strain x and say "I own this because the patient it came from resided on my soil".
You must add value beyond the natural product to get a patent. Just slapping an extra, non-functioning methyl group onto the end shouldn't do it--the modification must be something which differentiates the synthetic for the natural.
Or that is how it should be, imho.
The typo-gremlins seem to have chewed on my post between my monitor and the comments site.
I could swear that I correctly typed 'synthetic FROM the natural', not 'synthetic FOR the natural', in my last line.