I don’t blame Indonesia on this

Indonesia and the U.S. were still unable to renew an agreement over allowing a U.S. Navy medical lab to operate in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital.

The hang-up? U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt says Jakarta won’t give the lab H5N1, or bird flu, virus samples, or to give them to the rest of the world. (Yes, for once, this is not an anti-U.S. thing!)

But, the holdup isn’t as simple as Leavitt puts it. As the story notes:

Indonesia fears pharmaceutical company may use samples of Indonesian virus to make a highly profitable vaccine that might not even be available to Indonesians.

Bayu Krisnamurthi, head of a national commission dealing with avian flu, said in March that Indonesia would only send virus samples on a case-by-case basis until a new virus-sharing mechanism currently being drawn up by the World Health Organization took effect.

Hey, that fear in the first paragraph is no idle one. Developing nations have seen Big Pharma practice “nature piracy” for decades. If the U.S. Navy won’t provide the Indonesian government with ironclad-enough assurances against that, well, then it will just have to wait.

And, Leavitt admits that is a holdup:

“(Indonesian health minister Siti Fadillah Supari’s) main point is that what she wants should not be considered ‘royalties’ or ‘compensation,’” Leavitt said. “What she says she wants is for the contributing countries to be eligible for some share of the value commercial companies create out of the influenza samples they provide.”

And, the shame here isn’t just on the U.S. on the other side of the table, either. After all, a number of members of Big Pharma are headquartered in European Union countries.