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Peter Pitts: We're Taking Your Medicine, Literally
Peter Pitts: We're Taking Your Medicine, Literally
The Orange County News
By Peter Pitts
Thursday, March 1, 2007
Imagine that you are an inventor, and the government steals your highly lucrative idea, without any warning. The next day, you are informed that the government plans to mass-produce your invention and give it away for free. If you're lucky, they'll give you a pittance.
This is what happens, with increasing regularity, to the manufacturers of life-saving medicines. The most recent example just occurred in Thailand, when the military-appointed government issued "compulsory licenses" to obtain two drugs.
The first, the HIV/AIDS drug Kaletra, is produced by the U.S.-based Abbott Laboratories. The second, the popular heart-disease drug Plavix, is manufactured by Sanofi Aventis of France and America's Bristol Myers Squibb. The Thai government granted itself the right to produce Kaletra for five years and Plavix indefinitely.
Citing World Trade Organization rules that permit countries to lift patents during a "national emergency," Thailand's behavior was hardly unique. Across the world, it has been going on for years.
U.S. lawmakers are piling on. In January, 22 members of Congress signed a letter to the U.S. Trade Representative expressing their support for the Thai government's action. Why are American politicians siding with a foreign junta that wants to steal property rights from U.S. companies?
According to the Thai government, it "has a right to use any patent right for public health services." The government simply stole an invention to both produce and distribute it for free. Such action is a slap in the face to drugmakers, whose expensive investments in research and technology create these life-saving medicines in the first place.
Now it finally appears that those responsible for ensuring global health are taking notice of the detrimental effects such sweeping policies have on the world's poor.
In a speech in Thailand three days after the regime grabbed Kaletra and Plavix, Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization, laid out the key reasons why communicable diseases remain such a large problem in poor countries and are often neglected by research and development. One reason, she said, is that the pharmaceutical industry "has little incentive to develop drugs and vaccines for markets that cannot pay."
What did she mean?
First, such theft discourages innovation. Drug development is an enormously expensive, time-consuming venture requiring years of effort by teams of researchers.
For example, in 2004, according to the Government Accountability Office, the pharmaceutical industry spent $60 billion on research and development. The average drug costs nearly $1 billion to develop.
If a company stands no chance of recouping even a portion of that investment, where is its incentive to tackle the many diseases that ravage the Third World?
Further, if it is acceptable for generic drug producers to make a sizable profit on distributing drugs they didn't invent, why are the companies that created the medicines not justified in turning a profit?
Western drug companies may seem like good scapegoats, but in Thailand alone they have contributed tens of millions of dollars to family-planning programs and training programs for nurses and doctors fighting HIV/AIDS. And it's doubtful the Thai junta has the resources or the know-how to create such life-saving drugs on their own.
Also, there is no guarantee that the generic drugs produced by the Thai government will even work. Thai drugs are manufactured in factories that do not meet WHO standards, and if processed incorrectly, thousands of patients could see no improvement in their conditions or even could die from poisoning.
No one can question that nations like Thailand – which suffer from rates of poverty unimaginable to us – wish to combat these diseases in the most efficient way possible. But even though it's easier for governments and activist groups to attack pharmaceutical companies and steal their patents, the greater challenge in poor countries like Thailand is health care infrastructure, which is in serious need of investment.
In the face of these larger structural challenges, patent theft is simply a cop-out – a deadly one. |
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