[Marxism] MH/AP: US controls bird flu vaccines over bioweapon fears

[Walter Lippmann <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

("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 U.S. Three
of those nations - Iran, Cuba and Sudan - also are subject to a ban
on all human pandemic influenza vaccines as part of a general U.S.
embargo."
=====================================================================

MIAMI HERALD
Posted on Sat, Oct. 11, 2008
US controls bird flu vaccines over bioweapon fears
By ROBIN McDOWELL
Associated Press Writer

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/world/AP/story/722000.html

When Indonesia's health minister stopped sending bird flu viruses to
a research laboratory in the U.S. for fear Washington could use them
to make biological weapons, Defense Secretary Robert Gates laughed
and called it "the nuttiest thing" he'd ever heard.

Yet deep inside an 86-page supplement to United States export
regulations is a single sentence that bars U.S. exports of vaccines
for avian bird flu and dozens of other viruses to five countries
designated "state sponsors of terrorism."

The reason: 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 U.S. Three of those nations - Iran, Cuba and Sudan
- also are subject to a ban on all human pandemic influenza vaccines
as part of a general U.S. embargo.

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 recent
concerns about bird flu. Officials from the U.S. 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 The
Associated Press 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."

U.S. Commerce Assistant Secretary Christopher Wall declined to
elaborate on the precise threat posed by vaccines for chickens
infected with avian influenza, except to say there are "valid
security concerns" that they "do not fall into the wrong hands."

"Legitimate public health and scientific research is not adversely
affected by these controls," he said.

But some experts say the idea of using vaccines for bioweapons is
far-fetched, and that in a health emergency, it is unclear how
quickly authorities could cut through the current 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. All such decisions would follow negotiations at a
"very high level" of government.

That could makes 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. Sudan and Iran already have recorded cases of the virus in
poultry and Syria is surrounded by affected countries. Cuba, like all
nations, is vulnerable because the disease is delivered by migratory
birds.

Kumanan Wilson, whose research at the University of Toronto focuses
on policymaking in areas of health protection, said it would be
ironic if the bird flu virus morphed into a more dangerous form in
one of those countries.

"That would pose a much graver threat to the public than the
theoretical risk that the vaccine could be used for biological
warfare," he said.

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. If enemy states wanted to do that, they could make their own
vaccines or turn to a less hostile country like China, said Ian
Ramshaw, an expert on vaccine immunology and biosecurity at The
Australian National University in Canberra.

"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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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."

"There are malevolent actors in the U.S. just like there might be in
all these other countries," he said.

The policies were initially put in place amid biosecurity fears in
the mid-1990s and then bolstered after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and
subsequent anthrax letter mailings. The vaccines are among a long
list of other items barred to rogue states over fears they could be
used to make weapons of mass destruction, from technology and
chemicals to dangerous pathogens.

Bird flu has killed more than 240 people across the world since 2003,
nearly half of them in Indonesia.

Indonesia's health minister Siti Fadilah Supari first drew widespread
attention when she boycotted the World Health Organization's
50-year-old virus sharing system last year, saying pharmaceutical
companies were using viruses from developing nations without their
knowledge to make expensive vaccines. She has since called for the
creation of a global stockpile of drugs or other forms of
benefit-sharing.


=========================================
     WALTER LIPPMANN
     Los Angeles, California
     Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
     "Cuba - Un ParaÃso bajo el bloqueo"
=========================================

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