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Indonesia Stops Sharing Avian Virus Samples
Posted by
kdawson
on Thu Feb 08, 2007 01:48 PM
from the intellectual-property-flu dept.
from the intellectual-property-flu dept.
dankrabach writes "Indonesia has apparently decided to play the IP game, with the world's health at stake. The country, one of the hardest-hit by avian flu, has stopped submitting virus samples to the World Health Organization, and is negotiating to sell them to an American drug company that makes the vaccine. They feel slighted when they give away such samples, but then cannot afford the patented vaccines. Logical to me, given the rules of the game; however, can't we come up with some GPL'ish license to free any product based on this data?"
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Pirates! (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously can't wait to get my copies!
Re:Pirates! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Pirates! (Score:5, Funny)
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Avian Flu (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Avian Flu (Score:5, Informative)
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"Stanley, listen to me. I have SARS. There's only a ninety-eight percent chance that I will live."
Bird flu currently seems much deadlier, as more than half of the humans infected have died.
Re:Avian Flu (Score:4, Informative)
Be careful - I'd think about rewording that to "Bird flu currently seems much deadlier, as more than half of the humans known to be infected have died". We really don't have a good idea of how many people have been infected - we have a biased sample of the worst cases being reported (it doesn't get much worse than being dead).
That's not to say that Avian Flu isn't deadly - it is. It kills a significant fraction of the infected population. I suspect that the mortality rate is closer to 10% than 60% though when it gets exposed to a wider audience. I just hope we have an effective treatment (vaccine or medication) by that point.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
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60% Death Rate is the Big Deal (Score:3, Informative)
I think that Wikipedia might [wikipedia.org] have a good answer on this:
Re:Avian Flu (Score:5, Funny)
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The media ran out of missing attractive white women and immigrant children and you can only cover so many mountain climber deaths per year.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
To understand the concern around H5N1 you need to consider two things:
1. Mortality rate - H5N1 has a very high mortality rate, something like 60% of the people who get it, die! Regular flu has a mortality rate much much lower (several ord
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Option 2 (Score:3, Funny)
Awesome. (Score:2)
This is the right thing for 3rd world countries to do. Charge for the services they provide and compete in the marketplace rather than lining up for the soup kitchen.
Alternate first sentence (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd be pissed too if i was indonesia.
Re:Alternate first sentence (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't know if the GPL comment was a joke, (Score:2)
but it would only be beneficial to put a viral license (as it were) on this information if hobbyists and volunteers had the same drug synthesizing and gene sequencing abilities as major pharma/bio companies. However, after a few more generations of Moore's Law, maybe hobbyists and volunteers could do drug synthesis and gene sequencing completely in a virtual environment? Then, a GPL license would make sense.
Caveat: I hate to sound like a G. W. Republican, but such software would also make it easy to desig
No net change (Score:3, Insightful)
But, but, but the free market will fix everything! (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously,
No money? No reason. (Score:5, Insightful)
A vaccine is expensive to make.
If there's no profit, there's no incentive.
If there's no funding, there's no resources.
Tragic, but you don't want to do the work - no matter how helpful - if it doesn't put food on your table and a movie on your TV.
Sure you can volunteer a bit, but only if it doesn't harm your personal bottom line.
What are YOU doing to prepare the Avian Flu vaccine? Thought so.
In the long-shot chance you _are_ working on an Avian Flu vaccine, are you doing it for free? Thought so.
Yes, it makes sense for drug companies to charge a fortune for the Avian Flu vaccine - it will cost them a fortune to create it.
Yes, it makes sense for Indonesia to make arrangements to assure they get the vaccine (either thru barter or billing).
Yes, it sounds perverse to sell the disease to buy the cure.
Welcome to the real world.
You don't cure a pandemic for free.
You got a better idea?
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There's plenty of money. (Score:3, Insightful)
When viruses are outlawed... (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, I actually like the sound of that.
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Sad... (Score:2)
A touchy problem, that... (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps approaching the WHO looking for some form of compensation for sample collection could be attempted. Perhaps it already has been. But anyone who has dealt with a global scale NGO, especially a UN agency, knows that the bureaucracy involved makes even the most overburdened of national government bureaucracies look like a model of efficiency.
Still, though, I have to wonder about the claims that Indonesia [cia.gov] cannot afford to purchase the vaccines. Indonesia is one of the most populous countries in the world, and seems more than able to afford many of the trappings of a modern industrialized nation. Their GDP is close to a trillion dollars US. Is it possible that a certain amount of their stand on this issue is posturing? Or to the benefit of one particular agency or department of their government? Follow the money to its destination and more would begin to be clear.
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What are you talking about? Collecting samples for the Who is a bargain, the best they've ever had!
Dumb Question..... (Score:2)
Compare and contrast (Score:5, Interesting)
They feel slighted when they give away such samples, but then cannot afford the patented vaccines.
And the Shah of Iran in 1973, just before the oil crisis:
"Of course [the world price of oil] is going to rise," the Shah told the New York Times in 1973. "Certainly! And how...; You [Western nations] increased the price of wheat you sell us by 300%, and the same for sugar and cement...; You buy our crude oil and sell it back to us, redefined as petrochemicals, at a hundred times the price you've paid to us...; It's only fair that, from now on, you should pay more for oil. Let's say ten times more."
No real point. Just found the similarities interesting.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No. (Score:3, Informative)
I doubt it. The GPL works because individual programmers receive some sort of personal, non-monetary benefit from contributing to a GPL project -- the reputation, the joy of coding, etc. No similar incentive exists for drug companies to engage in costly research without the proceeds that come from patents. The GPL also works because for-profit players have an incentive to give back their own coding: so that it can be incorporated into the code tree and not require them to reimplement it every time a new version comes out. Again, there is no analogous market force to compel drug companies to give back changes, or even to make the changes in the first place. Finally, the GPL is largely enforceable because it is usually very straightforward to ascertain whether GPL'ed code is in fact being used in violation of the GPL: the software company cannot destroy the evidence or allow it to decay because they need to keep the source code to continue development. I imagine that it is not so easy to determine whether a particular medical advance was inspired by pseudo-GPL'ed samples.
It seems to me that that country's approach is fair and effective. Alternatively they might consider contractually binding recipients of their samples to offer them the resulting patented medication at cost.
As an american (and capitalist) (Score:2)
Big Businesses (not just american) basically rip off ignorant people and take advantage of them to make outsized profits.
We are under a transition where a lot of third world countries are becoming aware of the way they have been abused and want to charge a fair price based on the fact that they must pay for the vaccine, or pay for the "tires" made from their oil, or pay for the computer made from their copper, etc.
Socialists would say some magical government entity would balance t
Free drugs - doubtful (Score:4, Insightful)
No. Drug companies don't play games like this. None will sink money into developing a vaccine based on a virus sample if they cannot be granted exclusive rights to produce that vaccine for a period of time. They'll go spend their R&D dollars on fighting developing some other drug that they can use to rake in big stinking piles of cash instead.
That's the way capitalism works - when people decide what to invest in, they rarely look at putting money behind something that they realize is not likely to give them a large return out of the goodness of their hearts. They figure out what's going to make them the most money. The market is not known for rewarding altruism. As a result, any drug company that wants to continue to exist as a drug company is going to do very little in the way of charity research, and instead do the kind of stuff that attracts capital.
The only way we're going to get drug research without patent protection is to start some sort of government agency whose primary purpose is to do this stuff. But good luck getting that to happen (in the US, anyway) voters don't have a history of being in favor of things like this, and the drug industry would viciously lobby against any sort of government-sponsored competitor.
Just what we need... (Score:2, Insightful)
I know everyone is going to side with Indonesia...in fact, I think they should do what they need to do in order to secure their own access to medicines derived from the samples they give. However, if it were the U.S holding virus samples hostage for its own benefit, people would be calling for blood.
Another perfect example of hypocrisy. People want everything equal until someone or something they don't like gets to exercise the same equality.
Capitalism (Score:3, Insightful)
That's the rule, that's what corporations do, that's America! If they don't they very quickly get thrown out by the shareholders and replaced by those that understand this rule. Why are people shocked?
Nobody in their right mind expects Indonesians will be able to afford the vaccine, they will die en mass. This is why we have universities and the WHO, where scientists who haven't crossed over to the dark side develop cures for things.
If you GPL drugs, what happens when deaths occur? (Score:2)
In America if a drug causes a problem, the lawyers are ready to collect.
Can you imagine a GPLd vaccine that sells for $5 cost of production that causes 1 death per 5,000 doses. This may not get picked up in testing, but it might cause 1000 deaths before it gets recalled. If Merck sold the vaccine for $50, each family would get $1,000,000 and Merck would be out $1Billion. If it was a GPL $5 vaccine.......
We need a majpr population reduction anyway (Score:3, Interesting)
Waitaminute. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd get pretty tired of that, too. This isn't "playing the IP game, with the world's health at stake". This is fighting back against the IP trolls, who are holding the world's health hostage.
nationalize all drug companies (Score:3, Insightful)
Average Indonesian won't benefit (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead of the usual situation where virus samples go to Big Pharma, who make patented vaccine, and get rich saving the developed world and wealthy people in the developing world, while Indonesian proles get neither vaccine nor money, we'll have the situation where virus samples go to one part of Big Pharma, who will (hopefully) make vaccine, and get rich saving the developed world and rich people in the developing world, and send royalties back to already rich Indonesians. Again, Indonesian proles will get neither vaccine nor money.
This is just a cynical money grab by the Indonesian elite, and, worse, by restricting who gets access to virus samples they just might be delaying the development of a vaccine that will save millions of lives.
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To be fair, it was, at least until glass trinkets and flu blankets came along.
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That may seem like a simple solution... but it wouldn't work.
American Companies would just form joint 'research' partnerships (or some other shell game) with European/African/Asian/Any company & buy it through that.
Vaccines are problematic, because they're expensive to test, usually expensive to manufacture, and aren't needed year round. Companies don't want to make 'em because they aren't ludicrously profitable like every other pa
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That was quite the pun there sir, my hat's off to you
A Geek Solution (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess this is why geeks aren't called to solve world problems. It isn't an "American" problem, but an economic one. As the other poster pointed out vaccines cost money to develop, and test. A GPL license isn't going to solve that problem. A socialist solution were the entire planet pays for the process might. But then "the world" isn't noted for working together for the common good either.
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Re:A Solution (Score:4, Insightful)
The easiest way to achieve this is to charge for the samples, effectively providing funding for the purchase of the vaccine. Seems quite reasonable to me.
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To be honest, I'd find it hilarious if America got devastated by bird flu because of its own greed.
Why fire can't be fought with water (Score:2)