Immunocompetent

Stashed away in a somewhat obscure corner of the .mil webzone are an interesting set of H5N1 reports. Prepared about every week by the US Pacific Command (PACOM) and the Australian Army's Land Headquarters (LHQ), the reports summarize recent developments with H5N1 with an interesting twist.  Who they are prepared for isn't clear; but Immunocompetent thinks they look like a slide that goes into scheduled briefing for higher-ups somewhere on the military food chain, probably at the Office of the US Secretary of Defense, on whose website the files can be found.

We have some choice extracts below; but there's plenty more interesting reading that you can download. (And if the OSD "disappears" this information off its website, we have a complete archival copy.)

The reports, marked "unclassified", provide abbreviated updates H5N1 cases worldwide; but they are more interesting for what they select as newsworthy H5N1 politics.

Recently, PACOM has been very interested in the NAMRU-2 negotiation and the WHO PIP IGM, and the reports have included information not public elsewhere.  For instance, details on conversations between WHO staff and US government representatives, and on the (apparently failed) bilaterals between Indonesia and the US. (These were facilitated by Australia.) (More)

This is a short paper that I wrote late last year on the contradictory and self-destructive US and EU positions on influenza virus sharing and the Revised International Health Regulations. It was originally distributed at a meeting of the Pugwash Study Group on the Chemical and Biological Weapons Conventions and is thus written from a security perspective, and uses terms like "biosecurity".

I generally think that security language is essentially useless and even counterproductive for talking about flu, particularly the ill-defined term "biosecurity" which is dangerous (I try to always put it in quotes). I use it nonetheless because it is (hopefully temporarily) part of the lingua franca of security types (but never public health, I hope!).  (More)

If secondary sources are to be believed, such as this one, then CDC's PR hacks have sallied forth with a pack of lies about their patent claims on Indonesian, Thai, and other H5N1 genes, which were first brought into the public eye by this blog.

There are two main arguments that CDC has been quoted to me as making with respect to my article and related items that have come out in the press.  I will refute both of CDC's claims. (More)

 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.

 (More)

It would be hard to be more "in your face" than what the US National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control are doing with patent claims to their new H5N1 DNA vaccine.

But right there on the front page it's laid out in black and white:

Well, it doesn't literally say that; but this graphic appears:

  (More)