The recent H1N1 influenza pandemic re-emphasized the significance of sample and benefit sharing in the global response to public health crises. In 2007, the World Health Organization (WHO) initiated an Intergovernmental Meeting on Pandemic Influenza Preparedness (IGM) to develop a framework for the transfer and use of virus specimens and fair and equitable benefit sharing. The Open Ended Working Group (OEWG) convened to support this process will meet this December, leading up to its next report to the Executive Board of the World Health Assembly. In addition, the 10th Conference of Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 10 of the CBD) being held this October is expected to discuss a potentially legally binding regime on Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS), a concept contentiously invoked during negotiations over open and timely virus sample and benefit sharing. Other instruments and venues affect sample and benefit sharing, creating complex dynamics around biological and health diplomacy. This workshop will shed light on the legal and political intersections of these issues and their implications for global health security, visiting lessons learned and discussing possible options to move forward through upcoming forums.
Objectives:
· To facilitate informal communication across silos;
· To increase awareness of issues likely to arise during the COP10 of the CBD (October 2010), OEWG-IGM (December 2010), and related venues; and
· To highlight policy options open to the US government and its partners.
Output: Policy brief explaining key issues for a general policy audience. Any outcomes of the meeting will be presented in aggregate, and not attributed to any individual speaker.
This workshop will be open to the public. All remarks will be on a strictly not-for-attribution basis.
Please address questions and RSVP to Stimson Visiting Research Fellow Dr. Tomohiko Makino at [email protected].
Provisional Agenda
13:00 – 13:10 Introduction and Welcome
Julie E. Fischer, Stimson Global Health Security Program
13:10 – 14:00 Keynote speech
Virus Sample and Benefit Sharing – Lessons Learned in Health Diplomacy
Ambassador John E. Lange, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Moderator: Josh Michaud, Kaiser Family Foundation
14:00 – 14:30 Updates on Current IGM/OEWG Processes
Representative, State Department Office of International Health Affairs (OES/IHA) (invited)
Break 14:30 – 14:40
14:40 – 15:10 International Legal Space for Sample and Benefit Sharing
Lindsay F. Wiley, American University
Moderator: Josh Michaud
15:10 – 16:00 Moving Forward: Issues and Possible USG Actions
Michael Watson, Sanofi Pasteur
Gigi Kwik Gronvall, UMPC Center for Biosecurity
16:00 – 16:30 Discussion
Moderator: Julie E. Fischer
16:30 Adjourn
Panelist Biographies
Ambassador John E. Lange (Retired)
Senior Program Officer for Developing-Country Policy & Advocacy
Global Health Program, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Ambassador John E. Lange joined the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in March 2009. He engages in focused, high-level government relations efforts to advance the foundation’s global health goals in developing countries. Prior to joining the foundation, he served as the Special Representative on Avian and Pandemic Influenza in the U.S. Department of State. Earlier, he was Deputy Global AIDS Coordinator at the inception of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. From 1999 to 2002 he served as the U.S. Ambassador to Botswana. He led the American Embassy in Dar es Salaam at the time of the terrorist bombing on August 7, 1998. He also had tours of duty in Geneva, Switzerland; Lome, Togo; Paris, France; and Mexico City, Mexico. Prior to joining the Foreign Service in 1981, he worked for five years at the United Nations Association of the USA in New York. Lange graduated cum laude from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1975.
Lindsay F. Wiley
Assistant Professor of Law
Washington College of Law, American University
Professor Wiley is an Assistant Professor of Law at American University’s Washington College of Law where she teaches torts, health law, and public health law. Her current research focuses on access to health care and healthy conditions in the U.S. and globally. She also works on various law and policy issues at the intersection of public health, food systems, and environmental change. She studies the international health regulations, health and human rights, food and water security, public health emergency preparedness, biosecurity, and public nuisance law. Prior to joining the faculty at WCL, Professor Wiley was the Global Health Law Program Director at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University. She had also previously worked at the Center for Law and the Public’s Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the American Society for Law, Medicine and Ethics, and Gordon, Feinblatt, Rothman LLC in Baltimore, MD. She received her AB and JD from Harvard, where she served on the Harvard Law Review, and her MPH from Johns Hopkins.
Michael Watson
Vice President, Global Vaccination Policy
Sanofi Pasteur, Lyon, France
Dr. Michael Watson Leads the Global Immunisation Policy group at Sanofi Pasteur; based in Lyon, France. The Group is represented in the Asia Pacific, Latin America, North America and Europe, Africa, and the Middle East and is responsible for assuring the interface between Sanofi Pasteur and the key global and regional governmental and non-governmental public health organisations that play a role in immunisation policy, funding, financing, implementation, advocacy, and other issues. He is a UK trained physician with a clinical background in gastroenterology and infectious diseases. He has worked in pharmaceutical development since 1993 and since 1998 in vaccines. He spent 9 years with the European vaccines joint venture between Sanofi Pasteur and Merck: SPMSD, having led the teams that developed and licensed Pediacel® in the UK and Gardasil® (Quadrivalent 6,11,16,18 HPV vaccine) in Europe and has worked on most classes of vaccines. Prior to his current role, he was Executive Vice President of Research and Development at the vaccine company Acambis, based in Cambridge USA. During this time, he oversaw the licensure of the smallpox vaccine ACAM2000®, and the research and development of Chimerivax® platform based vaccines against Japanese encephalitis (completed phase 3) and West Nile Fever, an M2e universal Influenza vaccine, ACAM-FLU-A™ (completed phase 1), and the world’s most advanced C. difficile vaccine, ACAM-CDIFF™, as well as a number of pre-clinical stage projects including an HSV-2 vaccine and a number of innovative new vaccine delivery platforms.
Gigi Kwik Gronvall
Senior Associate
Center for Biosecurity, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
Dr. Gronvall is a Senior Associate at the Center for Biosecurity of UPMC and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. She is an immunologist by training. Dr. Gronvall’s work addresses the role of scientists in biodefense—how they can diminish the threat of biological weapons and how they can contribute to an effective technical response against a biological weapon or a natural epidemic. Dr. Gronvall served as the Science Advisor of the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism from April 2009 until the Commission ended in February 2010. She has testified before Congress about the safety and security of high-containment biological laboratories in the United States and served on several task forces related to laboratory security, including a 2008 Defense Science Board task force and a 2008 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) panel charged with providing technical input on the risk of operating Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory (NEIDL). Dr. Gronvall has investigated and presented policy recommendations on the governance of science to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) in Geneva, Switzerland (2003, 2005, and 2006). From 2000-2001 she was a National Research Council Postdoctoral Associate at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Dr. Gronvall received a BS in biology from Indiana University, Bloomington, and a PhD from Johns Hopkins University.
Josh Michaud
Senior Policy Analyst
Global Health, Kaiser Family Foundation
Dr. Josh Michaud is a Senior Policy Analyst, Global Health Policy with the Kaiser Family Foundation, an independent non-profit foundation that serves as a non-partisan source of facts, information, and analysis on U.S. domestic and global health policy issues. He is also a Senior Research Associate with the Global Health and Foreign Policy Initiative at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He has previously worked in the areas of global health, infectious disease, and epidemiology at the National Center for Medical Intelligence, the U.S. Department of Defense’s Global Emerging Infections System (GEIS), the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and as an independent consultant. He earned his Ph.D. in International Health Policy from SAIS, and holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara, an M.H.S. in Epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, and an M.A. in Applied Economics from Johns Hopkins University. His academic research has focused on global health policy, infectious diseases, economics and international relations, particularly the political and economic aspects of emerging infectious diseases.
Julie E. Fischer
Senior Associate
Global Health Security, Stimson Center
Dr. Julie E. Fischer leads Stimson’s Global Health Security program. Fischer is a former Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow and American Association for the Advancement of Science Congressional Fellow. As professional staff with the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, she worked on issues related to medical emergency preparedness, and the consequences of biological, chemical, and radiological exposures during military service. She served as a senior research fellow at the University of Washington/Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, and an independent consultant to a Thai-US collaboration aimed at strengthening Thai capacity to identify and control emerging infections of regional and global significance. She received a BA from Hollins University, and a PhD in microbiology and immunology from Vanderbilt University.
Tomohiko Makino
Visiting Fellow
Global Health Security, Stimson Center
Tomohiko Makino is a Visiting Fellow at the Stimson Center’s Global Health and Security Program. Before coming to the Stimson Center, Dr. Makino worked in the public health security field at the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare. He is currently pursuing a joint MPH/MBA at Johns Hopkins University to supplement his medical training at the University of Tokyo.