From CIDRAP (h/t Effect Measure):

Jun 19, 2007 – TORONTO (CIDRAP News) – The continuing debate over developing countries' ability to afford pandemic-influenza vaccines has produced a disturbing complication: the possibility that Indonesia and other countries affected by H5N1 avian flu will assert legal ownership of the viral isolates on which the vaccines would be based.

These are the same laws that the US shoves down the developing world's throat by insisting that they be recognized in order to get a World Bank loan, or a trade treaty. These same laws are used by Monsanto to say that when the wind blows seeds of their patented crops onto a farmer's field (who doesn't want them), that they can sue the farmer and confiscate his crops. These laws take the ability of corporations to rape the commons to a whole new conceptual level.

The fear of a legal claim that could disrupt flu surveillance and vaccine manufacturing is the latest chapter in a dispute that began late last year when the government of Indonesia withdrew from the 55-year-old system by which flu viruses are shared around the world.

Under that system, which was developed for tracking and controlling seasonal flu and has now been extended to flu strains that could spark a pandemic, viruses are isolated in a country and analyzed to increasing levels of sophistication by a national lab, regional lab, and WHO Influenza Collaborating Centers in Tokyo, Melbourne, London, and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Gene sequences from the analyses are used to identify emerging strains of flu and then passed free of charge to pharmaceutical companies to be commercialized as vaccines.

Developing countries paid little heed to the system for most of its existence because they do not manufacture vaccine and typically do not vaccinate their populations against seasonal flu. However, the Southeast Asian countries where H5N1 is concentrated have a strong interest in protecting their populations against a potential pandemic—but they would be unable to afford the pandemic-flu vaccines that Northern Hemisphere manufacturers might produce.

So it sound like Indonesia just wants to assure that they will be able to afford the vaccine when it's finally produced. But there's a whole lot of leverage built into this ploy. Maybe someone will finally reconsider the advisability of the idiotic path we're on.

Fat chance.