Gene Squatters Claim the Next Pandemic
If you think oil speculators are an ethically-challenged crowd, consider pandemic squatters. There are many examples. For one of the ugliest and most audacious, we turn to Finland.
Finns are usually an inoffensive lot, but it seems that a few of their number are hoping for the big one to come. A big pandemic, that is. And they're putting their money on H5N2. Helsinki-based Remedal, a tiny company with no apparent independent R&D capacity, has filed for patent on basically all injected or intranasal human vaccines containing an H5 and an N2 antigen (i.e. against H5N1 recombined with 'normal' human H3N2).
For good measure, Remedal further specifically claims such a vaccine using three HA genes that are WHO GISN materials: A/Hong Kong/213/2003, A/Vietnam/1194/2004, and A/Vietnam/1203/2004. (More)
Richard Holbrooke and Laurie Garrett are Full of Sh*t
Update: 6 September 2008
An Important Note About This Blog Entry
The short essay below was originally written as a Letter to the Editor of the Washington Post, because I believed that it was very important to publicly correct the numerous errors and misperceptions contained in the Holbrooke / Garrett editorial.
When the Washington Post did not publish the letter, I sent it to a number people and urgently asked them if they would be so kind as to put forward the ideas contained in the letter, given the important international humanitarian interest in reforming the GISN.
I was therefore very grateful when Ambassador Wibisono of Indonesia adapted the essay below and was able to have it published in the Jakarta Post on my behalf. An utmost priority in the debate over influenza virus sharing is widely circulating the powerful arguments for changing the current system, therefore, I again thank Ambassador Wibisono for his willingness to carry this message to a broader public.
EH
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... and it's time for America to wake up to that fact.
In their badly informed Washington Post op-ed "'Sovereignty' That Risks Global Health" (10 August), Richard Holbrooke and Laurie Garrett make a number of factual mistakes and misleading statements, some of which I will enumerate here.
About Immunocompetent
I am weary of public health G.I. Joes (and Janes) and other obsessives and their threats that we're all gonna die of bird flu.
I am turned off by the callous and poorly reasoned bashing of foreigners that fills many flu blogs.
I believe that greed and poor governance in the US and EU plays a huge and underexplored role in the sad state of global readiness for a flu pandemic.
I am sure that national security and public health ought not to be mixed up in the way they have become.
Immunocompetent is a place for enlightened talk about Bird Flu, and where xenophobia and fearmongering are banned.
Here you will find fresh perspective about the serious problem of potentially pandemic influenza. You'll get information and analysis that you won't find blogged elsewhere, because this site doesn't just comment on the news, it aims to make it.
From 1999 to 2008 your host, Edward Hammond, directed the Sunshine Project, a nongovernmental organization focusing on biological weapons and biosafety. He first stuck his toe into influenza issues in 2003, when the Sunshine Project issued one of the first public warnings that US scientists were intending to recreate 1918 influenza. Since 2006 he has focused on H5N1 issues, specifically, questions of access and benefit sharing related to influenza viruses.