During the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014, medical workers collected hundreds of thousands of samples of blood from victims and those presumed to be infected, in an effort to stem an epidemic that eventually took more than 11,000 lives.

After that outbreak subsided, most of the samples were believed to have been destroyed. But recent reporting by The Telegraph in London revealed that thousands of samples were not destroyed but, rather, shipped out of West Africa. The samples’ location isn’t clear—The Telegraph’s freedom of information request was turned back by the UK government—but they are believed to be in the custody of national health agencies, and possibly pharmaceutical companies, in Western Europe and the United States.

That those samples passed out of the countries where they originated is a scandal in the making, because if they provide the raw material for diagnostics or remedies made by Western companies, those products may be unaffordable to the countries where the samples originated.

Developing nations have protested before that richer countries and their corporations should compensate them for their biological resources. They consider it colonialism for the bioprospecting age: Instead of stripping the developing world of its precious metals, timber, or minerals, the nations of the West are mining for microbes and other biological source materials. Often the developing world’s objections go nowhere. But in a few cases, bolstered by an evolving body of international rules, the countries who feel their patrimony has been stolen have fought back and won.

In 2007, for instance, Indonesia refused to share samples of the avian flu strain H5N1—which at that point had killed more than half of those who came down with it—into the international network of labs that monitored the virus’ movement and evolution. The country’s health minister held them back in protest, after she learned that an Australian company had obtained some of Indonesia’s flu viruses and developed a test vaccine out of it; she feared Indonesia would not get access to the vaccine or be able to afford it.

A second clash over flu vaccine showed that her concerns had been reasonable. A different flu strain, H1N1, caused a worldwide epidemic in 2009. As before, vaccine-making swung into gear. But it soon emerged that the Pacific Rim countries where vaccine strains originate would have little chance to buy the vaccine, because the affluent northern countries where manufacturers are based had placed advance orders that would use up the new supply.

In the aftermath of those linked crises, the World Health Organization developed its Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Framework, which commits member countries to equitably sharing viruses and the vaccines made from them. More practically, it drew vaccine manufacturers into an agreement in which they would return a small portion of profits to countries where strains originated, so the countries’ own pandemic defenses could be strengthened.

That agreement, which only covers flu, could serve as a global model of sorts. But it doesn’t address the broader question of a poor country losing control of its biological resources to a rich one. The international covenant that could address that situation, known as the Nagoya Protocol, hasn’t received anywhere near as much support.

The protocol—formally, the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization—became effective in 2014. It’s a subsidiary agreement to the Convention on Biological Diversity, in force since 1993. Among the things the convention covers is fair treatment when it comes to biological resource extraction; the protocol goes further by defining enforcement. Most of the countries in the world have signed and ratified the convention, and a little more than 100 have signed and ratified the protocol. Those numbers include most of the big vaccine-making nations, but notably not the United States, which signed but never ratified the convention, and thus has not endorsed the protocol.