In 2007, then Indonesian Health Minister, Dr Siti Fadilah Supari, withheld Indonesia’s H5N1 pandemic influenza samples from the World Health Organization (WHO), invoking the provisions of the Convention on Biological Diversity to claim sovereign ownership over Indonesia’s virus samples. This was in protest against what Indonesia saw as the inequitable allocation of the world’s pandemic influenza vaccines, which persistently left developing countries with inadequate supplies to protect their populations. In 2011, the WHO implemented the Pandemic Influenza Preparedness (PIP) Framework to establish global norms for the reciprocal delivery of benefits to those countries that share their virus samples. The problem is that the PIP Framework only applies to pandemic influenza virus samples. So the question remains: who owns the world’s viruses and what will you have to pay to access them?