“Multidrug resistant tuberculosis is a growing threat, and bedaquiline is essential to curing it. Generic bedaquiline will drive down the cost of the drug by over 60%, allowing far more communities to access and distribute treatment. Evergreening the patent will cost so many lives over the next four years, which Johnson & Johnson knows. They must drop their efforts to enforce the secondary patents.”
"Tell Johnson and Johnson that evergreening their patent on bedaquiline, which will deny millions of people access to live-saving treatment, is a violation of their corporate credo: https://secure.ethicspoint.com/domain… Tell them on twitter: https://twitter.com/JNJNews and https://twitter.com/JNJGlobalHealth Tell them on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jnj/ Tell them on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jnj/?hl=en And tell them wherever else you can. Tell your friends. Tell your family. Tell the Internet. This must not be allowed to happen.
Big thanks to TB expert Dr. Carole Mitnick and MSF’s Christophe Perrin for helping me to understand the complexities of drug patents!"
At its core, there’s two competing ideas here, and neither are inherent corporate greed (although that’s certainly the motivation for JJ).
Whoever discovers or creates something brand new should have the exclusive rights to create/use that for X time. This rewards and encourages innovation, and companies recoup the cost of research.
A medical discovery which helps people should be as widely and readily accessible as possible.
The second has to be achieved no matter what, so the question is how you provide a profit motive for discovery while not making the product exclusive. What if instead of exclusivity, the creator received preferential treatment? The government buys X of the new drug, and the creator can supply that full amount – if they can’t though, then others can fill the gap. This needs more consideration, but the basic idea is that the creator gets to sell their supply first, and others can sell after that.
Yeah…You need to profit to incentivize innovation and r&d. Fine.
Why does that mean you should get total control? Especially for drugs - for many reasons (it’s a very messed up industry), but most of all because public health affects all of us - not just when we’re directly connected to the victims.
Already, patents are basically a temporary monopoly. The government sets all sorts of weird limits. It’s not a free market, not even remotely close
So why should they get total control instead of fixed percentage by anyone making the drug? Maybe limited to time frame, maybe based on a multiple of cost
Hell, uncle Sam pays for a lot of this research, and the big players spin off subsidiaries to subsidize the risk. We could offer bounties or make the research fully public. There’s so many ways to do this better
Instead, we use a method where corporations get to make decisions, with zero concern over the cost in lives, or the drain on society it causes
I think it’s important to distinguish the underlying goal from the mechanism used to achieve this. (In software user story development we distinguish between the “so that” and the “I want”.)
So I would restate this as:
This does not need to be via a period of exclusivity. Exclusivity is one way of doing it, and it’s a pretty good one, but jumping ahead to that shortcuts the ability to come up with other possibilities.
Agreed. There’s other ways to accomplish this, and that should be the case for medicines.