"What Bush did not Explain About Bird Flu"

Read James Love's complete posting on The Huffington Post.

"Roche cannot meet the exploding demand for Tamiflu, and it is still trying to fight off or limit efforts by generic producers in Argentina, Canada, India, Korea, Taiwan and Thailand to produce cheap copies of the drug.

"However, even if these countries succeed in issuing compulsory licenses to the Roche/Gillead patents on Tamiflu, to enable generic competition for the drug, the US will still have problems importing the medicine. This is because of a little known provision in a 2003 WTO agreement on patents and medicine. The United States elected to "opt-out" of the WTO provisions that would have allowed foreign countries to export generic medicines to the US, when there is a compulsory liciense on a patent.

"The US "opt-out" was extreme. It covers every conceivable case, including cases of national emergency, such as flu pandemic, an anthrax attack, SARS, or anything else. Now the Bush Administration seeks to make this policy permanent, in negotiations taking place right now, so that it can be announced a the December WTO meeting in Hong Kong. This policy, which is coordinated with the European Commission, is designed to undermine compulsory licensing, and pressure poor countries not to use this tool. But now it will prevent the US from effectively harnassing the power of the market to produce needed stockples of generic Tamiflu."