All Posts Tagged With: "Drug Patents"
Drug patents are beside the point
This week Switzerland will become ground zero for the future of health policy in Africa. The World Health Organisation’s (WHO) intergovernmental working group is meeting in Geneva to discuss public health, medical innovation and intellectual property.
Many participants are expected to express their support for efforts to undermine patent protections for drugs. In doing so, however, these attendees ignore the more fundamental problem facing poor African nations — dilapidated healthcare infrastructure.
The anti-patent crowd believes that patents keep prices high and drugs out of the reach of the poor. It blames pharmaceutical firms for the suffering of the impoverished and calls on developing nations to employ patent-revoking compulsory licences that encourage the production of cheaper generics.
But even if medicine were available for free, as it often is in poor nations, dysfunctional institutions and personnel ensure that the needy can’t access it.
Despite unprecedented quantities of monetary aid to the ministries of health of many African countries, health systems on the continent have languished. Between 1990 and 2005 development assistance for health increased from $2,5-billion to more than $13-billion. Overall about 10% of Africa’s healthcare expenditure is financed by donor aid.
And yet more than 50% of Africans lack access to essential medicines, according to the WHO. Around the world more than 10-million children in developing countries die unnecessarily from diseases that are easily preventable and cheap to treat, such as diarrhoea, measles and malaria. Furthermore, up to 80% of Africans have to pay for treatment from their own pockets. In short, public health systems are failing to deliver.
Why? For starters nearly all Âforeign aid must first pass through health ministries before reaching patients. According to studies undertaken by the WHO and the Centre for Global Development, donor nations rarely know what happens to their money after they hand it over to a recipient government - it is routinely subverted by health officials for private gain.
There is leakage of drugs from the supply chain. Publicly funded drugs can fetch a higher price if resold on the black market. Recent surveys in Nigeria show that 28 public health centres received no drugs from the federal government for two years and a 2001 World Bank study showed that fewer than half of government health facilities in the Nigerian states of Lagos and Kogi received any drugs at all.
Last year Dora Akunyili, the Director General of Nigeria’s National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, disclosed that it was commonplace for donated drugs, such as vitamin A capsules, Mectizan and Coartem tablets and oral rehydration salt, to be pilfered and resold on the open market.
Read the rest of this article on drug patents in Africa.
Drug Patents Are Good For Our Health
The Financial Times
by Miles White
Chairman & CEO, Abbott Laboratories
For the past several months, Abbott Laboratories has engaged in highly publicized negotiations with the government of Brazil over the purchase of Aids medications. This negotiation has just been concluded positively: Abbott further reduced the cost of treatment per patient and the government agreed to honor our patent. But we cannot let the agreement end discussion of the ideas involved; it is essential that we consider their implications so as to avoid situations that might not be so fortunately resolved. What hangs in the balance is how the world will continue to develop the medicines it needs. Abbott discovered and developed Kaletra, the most widely used protease inhibitor medication to fight Aids by blocking the replication of HIV. The government of Brazil said that it would break our patent and produce a generic version locally in order to treat more patients. Brazil moved from this position and agreed to an arrangement that meets not only its needs and ours, but the world’s - the need for continued innovation of new and better treatments for new and worse diseases.
Aids was a death sentence until late 1995, when the first of the HIV protease inhibitor medicines was introduced. Combined with other innovative medications, they helped turn HIV infection into a chronic, manageable disease for treated patients. That remarkable success against the greatest medical challenge of our time is the product of innovation, driven by the protection of intellectual property and the incentive it provides.
The negotiation raised a well-worn chorus of criticisms of the patent system, but failed to address the underlying question: how would our society continue to progress without it? The problem is that our global needs and global systems are in conflict. This threatens to harm one goal, innovation, in the name of another, access to medicine. Access is the goal the world cares about and one taken seriously by innovator companies (those that conduct research and development of new medicines) that have made significant contributions to this end across the developing world - from building healthcare infrastructure in Africa, to drastic price cuts that have benefited a wide range of countries, including Brazil. But it must be recognized that access is inseparable from innovation: without access, innovation is meaningless; without innovation, there is nothing to have access to.
As Abraham Lincoln recognized, in words chiseled into the Commerce Building in Washington: "The patent system added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius." Since Lincoln’s birth, just 200 years ago, the way we live has progressed more than it did over millennia before. The difference has been technological progress; progress in medicine, in sanitation, in nutrition, in information, in hundreds of ways that have made our lives longer, healthier, safer and more comfortable. These improvements in the way we live are the result of continual innovation. That innovation has been made possible by intellectual property protection.
As Lincoln understood, genius alone is not enough to secure these benefits. We need the fuel. We need "interest" - the potential for return. We need it because, today, it takes so much to bring the fruits of genius to the people who require them. When Wallace Abbott, our company’s founder, began producing effective new medicines in the 1880s, he was able to do so by hand at low cost. Today, creating a single new medication costs, on average, about $1bn. That massive funding comes from one source alone: private investors. Without a promise of return on that investment - "the fuel of interest" - that funding will go elsewhere, to opportunities that are less vital and less risky. And that is a risk our world cannot live with and cannot allow.
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Drug Patents And The Future
A worldwide campaign is now well underway to demonize pharmaceutical companies and champion generic drugs. Former Vice President Al Gore employed this argument in his last presidential campaign as do various organizations including Doctors Without Borders, Act-Up, the AARP and a host of others.
The supposition is that drug companies with a license to market a certain pharmaceutical use their limited monopoly to milk the public. That this isn’t the case is beside the point since the perception is gaining widespread acceptance.
The U.S. trade representative and the European Union have been at loggerheads over the United Nation’s role in regulating or influencing drug prices with European states eager to eliminate or ease the property rights of American drug companies so that they can enter the generic market. “Put lives ahead of profits” has become the calling card of the generic drug interests.
Overlooked in this glib assertion of humanitarianism is the extraordinary medical miracles wrought by the pharmaceutical industry. Since it takes roughly a billion dollars to take a new drug from the lab through trials and approval and into the market, company pricing invariably reflects a wish to recoup costs and generate some profit for its stockholders. Needless to say generic manufacturers have no expense in research and development; they merely produce formulas of known drugs when licensing provisions mature.
In addition, major companies often discount drugs in poor nations. Last year, five drug companies offered the U.N. World Health Organization and developing nations in Africa anti HIV retroviral drugs at prices reduced by as much as 90 percent.
As Pfizer spokesman Brian McGlynn noted, “Everyone—senior citizens, AIDS activists—always accuses us of being profiteers…they say we’d rather give a rich white guy an erection than help an African with AIDS.” Perceptions die hard. Last year the Pfizer company offered its AIDS drugs free of charge to Kenyan patients.
What the activists generally do not appreciate is that unauthorized copy cat drugs may reduce cost, but such practices amount to the stealing of intellectual property. Without the profit motive—critics decry—to fund new drugs, many sick diseased people could not obtain the miracle pharmaceuticals which reduce and often eliminate their misery. Pfizer—to cite one example—has a research budget of $4.7 billion and the company does not recoup its investment on about 30 percent of its medicines.
In order to bypass patent laws, activists have urged many nations to engage in parallel importation, which involves importing brand name drugs from countries where they are selling at a discount or importing generic drugs. In either case patent rights are being violated.
What the activists contend is that human rights should trump commercial rights. While this assertion doesn’t take into account the correlation between commercial and human rights, it has a global appeal.
In fact, many nations have been encouraged to engage in patent violations in an effort to deal with the AIDS pandemic, the anthrax and smallpox scares and other diseases. Yusef Hamied, owner of the Indian generic drug company Cipla, argues that medical discoveries should be free of patents. Of course, he would be the direct beneficiary of such a policy shift.
Read the rest of this article on drug patents here.