ABC's Bird Flu Movie (Implications)

Did anyone else catch ABC’s Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America? I love natural-disaster-type movies, so I TiVo’d it and watched it late last night. The cinematic aspects really aren’t worth discussing, but it did raise a few interesting thoughts:

A) Does our increasingly on-demand economy make the US too vulnerable to total disruptions in the global supply chain? In general, we are probably diversified enough to survive being cut off from particular parts of the world. However, it is interesting to think of what would happen if we were completely isolated. What critical shortages would we face? Hopefully someone is thinking of this sort of thing. Should we leverage corporate tax breaks to maintain warehouses full of particularly critical inventory?

B) **Does the US government have a clear plan for breaking foreign vaccine/anti-viral patents in the face of shortages? ** I think we should respect foreign drug patents as long as long as supplies are adequate, but I found it ridiculous that the movie gov’t didn’t break the patent immediately when it became clear that hundreds of thousands of people were going to die while we waited in line for delivery. Of course, it could be that it takes 6-12 months to manufacture, so we’d have to decide now to pre-emptively break patents. This would obviously have a huge impact on international patent treaties. However, can’t there be some middle ground where the gov’t steps in (in only these cases) and sets a flat patent license rate to be paid to the patent owner? (Don’t we do something like that for broadcast radio?)

Anyway, I’d be interested to hear other people’s takes on both of those issues and anything else related to our preparedness for dealing with a pandemic. I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking these things through, so I’m sure I have a lot of ignorance worth fighting. :slight_smile:

I didn’t see the movie, so I don’t know exactly what happened, but regarding point B, flu vaccines take a long time to make, and Tamiflu, which has been widely touted as an effective antiviral against the flu, is also hard to make in great quantities, since some of the basic ingredients are very limited. Just last week there was a story about a possible way to increase production by removing star anise as a required ingredient and sidestepping some intermediate products that are so reactive that they are only made in small doses for safety’s sake. Of course, that’s all still in the lab. So it may not be the case that we can produce that kind of thing on the spur of the moment.

As for preemptively breaking treaties, it’s probably a bad idea. US companies have much more to lose than foreign if the world started flouting drug IP. In the long run, you’d see greatly decreased investment in pharmaceutical R&D, which would leave us in a bad place for the next Oh My God We’re All Gonna Die disease.