GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Britain’s largest drugs company, is in talks with the World Health Organisation (WHO) about a proposal for a subsidised mass vaccination programme against avian flu for developing countries, The Times has learnt.

Jean-Pierre Garnier, GSK’s chief executive, will meet Margaret Chan, the WHO’s director-general, on Friday to discuss proposals to provide low-cost vaccines against the H5N1 virus to countries such as Indonesia, which has suffered the highest number of deaths from avian flu so far.

The negotiations come after concern that poorer countries, particularly in the Far East, are likely to be at the forefront of any human outbreak of pandemic flu but could be unable to afford to buy the vaccines being developed by big Western drug companies.

In protest, Indonesia temporarily halted the supply of its bird flu strains to the WHO because it said that they were being used commercially to create products that the country could not afford.

There is also concern about the pharmaceutical industry’s capacity to produce enough vaccines to keep pace with demand in the event of an outbreak. Dr Garnier said: “They [poorer countries] are concerned that the pharma companies are not going to have enough [vaccines] for them. Many of those countries don’t have unlimited financial means, so there is kind of an anxiety about what do we do now.”

Dr Garnier, in an interview with The Times, declined to comment on the content of the WHO discussions, saying only that GSK “had a proposal to make”. He said: “We will be a piece of the solution. We want to work with the WHO.” The main problems were “capacity limitation and . . . an economic issue”, Dr Garnier said.

“We have got to make all those things work,” he said, adding that further details would be made public after April 6.

The governments of Switzerland and the United States have already begun to stockpile a prepandemic H5N1 flu vaccine developed by GSK. The company is also in talks with the governments of Britain, France and other countries.

Dr Garnier said that the long-term solution to the problem would be to expand global capacity to manufacture flu vaccines, which at the moment is restricted almost exclusively to sites in Europe, America and Japan.

The pandemic flu vaccines that have been developed by companies including GSK, Sanofi-Aventis, of France, and America’s Baxter Pharmaceuticals have been shown to offer protection against the H5N1 strain of the avian flu virus, but their potency against a possible mutant strain is unknown.

Dr Garnier said that there remained a fundamental capacity problem in the world’s ability to manufacture vaccines. At the moment, he said, there would not be enough production capacity to meet demand, although progress was being made.

Last autumn, the WHO gave warning that the world was several billion doses short of the flu vaccine production capacity needed to guard against a possible pandemic.

The WHO has launched an emergency plan to expand the industry’s ability to make vaccines from the current 350 million doses per year to levels that would be required to shield the entire global population of about 6.7 billion people.

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