Saturday, February 11, 2012

The past couple of weeks have been intensively involved in discussion about the H5N1 issue. Extraordinary “legal” issues come up about what can and cannot be discussed in public. I pushed for and it will happen next week for a WHO meeting to make all of this more transparent and international. The issue is what can and cannot be discussed at this meeting. There are 2 options to allow discussion at the meeting: 1) an “export control license” from the Dept. of Commerce that restricts discussion to the people listed on the license, i.e. all the attendees at the meeting or; 2) An advisory opinion from the dept. of Commerce saying that the information is intended to be published by the journals and therefore the expert control requirement does not exist. Some subterfuge has gone on with HHS in getting the journals to say that they have every intention of publishing the papers without restrictions (which is not true) just so that they can get an advisory opinion. The problem is that since Commerce grants both the export control (which assumes restriction) as well as advisory opinion (which assumes open publication without restriction) you cannot have it both ways. Bottom line is that based on the journals declaring that they intend to publish an advisory opinion will be granted. I expressed my concern that this was not entirely honest, but it went ahead anyway. This is something that I do not control. I leave for Geneva on Feb. 14 for a meeting on Feb. 16-17, 2012.