On 14 August, this World Health Organisation draft on pandemic flu preparedness was leaked on Wikileaks.

This passage is perhaps most striking:

‘global influenza vaccine manufacturing capacity is insufficient to meet demand in a pandemic and [...] in the absence of a multilateral system of benefit sharing, some Member States, particularly developing countries, can neither afford nor access the vaccines’

In other words, ‘there isn’t enough vaccine to go around, poorer countries will be priced out of the market, and millions will die in the event of a pandemic’. Basically, this passage amounts to the blackmailing of developing countries into accepting the WHO’s particular ‘virus sharing’ system. Indonesia has felt the need to withhold virus samples from the WHO in protest of the current system, so what does this system entail?

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