Indonesia seeks assurances over bird flu vaccine

Indonesia will not share bird flu samples with the World Health Organisation without a legally binding agreement promising the virus will not be used to develop an expensive commercial vaccine, the health minister said.

Siti Fadilah Supari, digging her heels in following a standoff with the global body, said a letter of guarantee from WHO’s director general Margaret Chan late last month was not good enough.

“We will not share the virus before there is a Material Transfer Agreement,” she told reporters yesterday, adding she hoped one would be drafted during a bird flu meeting in Jakarta later this month between Asia Pacific health leaders and WHO.

Several countries are developing vaccines to protect against H5N1, the bird flu virus strain blamed for 168 human deaths worldwide – more than a third of them in Indonesia.

The virus remains mainly an animal disease, but experts fear it may mutate into a form that easily spreads between humans, potentially killing millions.

Indonesia is worried that large drug companies will use its H5N1 strain, sent to WHO affiliated laboratories to confirm human infections, to make vaccines that will ultimately be unaffordable for developing nations.

International health experts say that is a real possibility and note that global capacity for bird flu vaccine production is currently up to 500 million doses – far short of what would be needed, and poor countries are likely to be at the end of the line.

Chan told Supari in a February 28 letter that WHO would use Indonesia’s strain of the virus “for public health risk assessment purposes only.”

Until a formal agreement is reached, WHO will obtain authorisation from Indonesia before sending any “H5N1 strain as a vaccine seed virus to a vaccine producer for production of influenza H5N1 vaccine,” the letter promised.

Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country, is seen as a potential hotspot for a global pandemic due to its high density of people and chickens.

The government’s decision to withhold the vaccine was a major departure from WHO’s virus-sharing system, in which influenza samples are freely passed throughout the global community for public health purposes, including vaccine development.