JAKARTA: When Indonesia’s health minister stopped sending bird flu viruses to a research laboratory in the US 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 87-page supplement to United States export regulations is a single sentence that bars US 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 US. 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 US 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 US 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, could 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.”
US 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 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 make 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.
