[Ip-health] WSJ: Drug Firms Say a Global Bioterrorism Pact Could Put TheirCorporate Secrets at Risk

[Khalil Elouardighi]

See ? BIOTERRORISM : PHARMA HARMING NATIONAL SECURITY
Who will take on the Op-Ed ?

Khalil.

----- Original Message -----
From: Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>
To: <ip-health@lists.essential.org>
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2001 10:19 PM
Subject: [Ip-health] WSJ: Drug Firms Say a Global Bioterrorism Pact Could
Put TheirCorporate Secrets at Risk


> October 25, 2001
> Drug Firms Say a Global Bioterrorism Pact Could Put Their Corporate
> Secrets at Risk
> By CHRIS ADAMS
> Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
>
> WASHINGTON -- Officials at pharmaceuticals company Pfizer Inc. were
> surprised when Russian inspectors came poking around their facilities in
> Indiana and Connecticut seven years ago. The Russians, who were looking
> for evidence of biological weapons production, didn't find any, but
> Pfizer's reaction to their inspections helps explain why the U.S. has
> refused to sign onto a plan to add teeth to a global pact against them.
>
> The visits, permitted under a separate, now-moribund pact the U.S.
> signed with Russia and Britain, rankled
> the pharmaceuticals industry long afterward. "We  don't trust the
> government to protect us," one official
> said years later. The industry lobbied hard against any global agreement
> throughout the Clinton  administration, arguing that the outside
> inspectors could disrupt business and pilfer corporate secrets. That
> argument eventually made some headway, and with the arrival of a
> friendlier Bush administration, the U.S. pulled its support for
> proposals on monitoring.
>
> Yet as the U.S. reacts to a flurry of anthrax attacks, and struggles
> along with other nations to contain the threat of biological weapons
> generally, many arms-control advocates say the world more than ever
> needs
> an effective biological-weapons agreement. The U.S. is a signatory to a
> 1972 treaty, but it has effectively  blocked attempts to create
> monitoring provisions for that agreement.
>
> >From the time that negotiators from several dozen countries began
> drafting the addendum about five years
> ago, the U.S. expressed qualms. Still, many nations were stunned when,
> last summer, the Bush administration withdrew. The lead U.S. negotiator
> declared that the proposals "wouldn't achieve their objectives, that no
> modification of them would allow them to achieve their objectives, and
> that trying to do more would simply raise the risk to legitimate United
> States activities."
>
>  'Stakeholder' in Issue
>
> Prominent behind the scenes was the U.S. pharmaceuticals industry. State
> Department negotiator Donald
> Mahley, describing the industry as a "stakeholder" in the issue, told
> Congress this year he has "consulted
> regularly with the pharmaceutical industry in the United States since
> the very onset of the negotiations." When Mr. Mahley announced the U.S.
> rejection of the enforcement proposal in July, he said it would, among
> other things, "put national security and confidential business
> information at risk."
>
> The Bush administration is sensitive to suggestions of favoritism toward
> the pharmaceuticals industry. President Bush received big contributions
> from industry sources during his 2000 election campaign, and top
> officials of his administration include former industry executives and
> investors. But an administration official says that while the drug
> industry's position "certainly did" influence its action, "the risk to
> economic interests was an important factor." Also, the official says
> national-security concerns  played a big role, given fears that
> monitoring provisions could reveal "vulnerabilities" in U.S. defenses.
>
> "I wouldn't say our position was adopted because of industry
> pressure,"   the official says.
>
> Amy Smithson of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington think tank,
> says the drug industry's stance throughout the negotiations was in stark
> contrast with the chemicals industry's during talks on a similar
> chemical-weapons agreement. "When the sister treaty was being
> negotiated, the chemical-industry association took the lead in eliciting
> the kind of information that would make the treaty work," she says.
> "They
> opened their doors for national trial inspections. And that's where you
> figure out what does and doesn't work."
>
>  The pharmaceuticals industry hasn't done the same, Ms. Smithson says,
> and with so little information on biological-weapons monitoring, "it's
> difficult to tell what will work reliably."
>
>  "The pharmaceutical industry overflows with brilliant scientists who
> relish the tough problem," she says. "They should be cut loose to take a
> crack at this one -- how to create a  feasible, meaningful
> iological-weapons monitoring regime."
>
> The issue isn't dead, the Bush administration official says. The U.S.
> hopes to win support from allies for
> an alternative proposal that it hopes to present next month at an
> international biological-weapons convention in Geneva. Instead of
> pushing inspections, it would seek to strengthen enforcement by
> compelling nations to enhance criminal penalties for people engaged in
> activities prohibited by the 1972  biological-weapons convention; boost
> oversight of genetic engineering, and increase international
> investigations of suspicious disease outbreaks.
>
> The original treaty prohibits the development and possession of
> biological weapons, although it does allow
> work on vaccines or other defensive measures to protect from an
> aggressor's bioweapons. The industry
> has agreed with the treaty from the start, representatives say, just not
> the monitoring proposals.
>
> 'Bad Protocol'
>  "What we didn't want was a bad protocol that gave a false sense of
> security and also unfairly targeted our
>  industry," says Gillian Woollett of the Pharmaceutical Research and
> Manufacturers of America, the  industry's Washington trade group, known
> as PhRMA (and pronounced "Pharma").
>
> Without verification procedures, however, the treaty is widely seen as
> ineffective. And unless the U.S.
> opens its pharmaceuticals plants to outside inspectors, other nations
> are unlikely to open theirs. Plenty of
> evidence since 1972 suggests that some of the countries the U.S. most
> fears, such as Iraq and the former
> members of the Soviet Union, haven't complied. The mid-1990s efforts to
> devise monitoring procedures
> were designed to correct that.
>
> But deciding how to monitor something as elusive as biological weapons,
> which can consist merely of a
> microbe in development stages, is tricky.
>
> Some Saw Fishing Expeditions
>
>  From the start of the negotiations, those 1994 Pfizer inspections
> colored the drug industry's mindset. Many
> in the industry saw the inspections as fishing expeditions that they
> said yielded no evidence of weapons
> but still resulted in bogus charges in the Russian media that the plants
> were equipped to produce biological
> weapons.
>
> The pact among the U.S., Russia and Britain that allowed for those
> inspections-on-demand was aimed at
> identifying plants that could be used as -- or converted to --
> biological-weapons facilities. The Russians
> apparently picked the Pfizer plants because they contained buildings
> that were owned by the U.S. government during World War II (although one
> had nothing to do with chemicals manufacturing). Pfizer
> grudgingly agreed to the visits, not wanting to defy the U.S.
> government, despite its fears about corporate
> confidentiality.
>
> Officials from several nations in Geneva worked up monitoring provisions
> with three basic components.
> Annual declarations would be compiled of "dual use" plants that could
> make both medicines and weapons.
> Those plants would be subject to random "transparency visits,"
> permitting outside inspectors to make
> thorough tours. In addition, "challenge inspections" could be done if a
> nation had specific evidence a plant
> was up to no good. Drug makers had concerns about all three components.
>
> PhRMA argued that the transparency visits would be useless because plant
> operators could "quickly
> obliterate traces of any development, manufacture or storage of a
> biological warfare agent," so why force
> them on private companies conducting proprietary research? PhRMA said it
> would consent to what it
> called "familiarization," or "educational" visits, "provided they are
> voluntary and under the full control of the
> company visited." As for the proposed challenge visits, PhRMA said those
> were acceptable if access were tightly controlled, and the inspected
> company had "final determination of what is proprietary  information."
>
> Write to Chris Adams at chris.adams@wsj.com
>
>
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