Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
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PHOTO: Getty Images
There are very good reasons to drastically reduce intellectual property protections on pharmaceutical drugs.
(1) The vast majority of new drugs are discovered by university researchers using federal tax dollars, and are then licensed to pharmaceutical corporations under exclusive licensing laws. Since this is taxpayer-financed research, there is no justification for pharmaceutical corporations having exclusive rights to the results of that research.
(2) The only major expense of the pharmaceutical corporations is for clinical drug trials involving human subjects, which are needed to verify the safety and efficacy of the drugs in question. Notably, pharmaceutical corporations spend 2-3 times as much on marketing their drugs than they do on basic research and development.
(3) Generally, the drugs are far cheaper to produce than the corporations will admit (particularly with so much manufacturing outsourced to places like Mexico and India, with dubious quality issues as well). This is why they need those intellectual property agreements in trade deals like the TPP - it's all about protecting their bloated profit margins. Really, there's not much difference between a drug cartel and a pharmaceutical corporation, neither one has anything other than maximizing profits in mind. For example, this is why they have no interest in finding a cure for HIV - maintaining people on cocktails of anti-retrovirals at prices of $1000-$3000 per month for the rest of their lives is FAR more profitable than a one-time cure would be.
Take a look at this approach - the pharmaceutical corporations and Wall Street's worst nightmare:
Open source drug discovery: A
new paradigm of collaborative research in tuberculosis drug development (2011),
Tuberculosis.
It is being realized that the traditional closed-door and market driven approaches for drug discovery may not be the best suited model for the diseases of the developing world such as tuberculosis and malaria, because most patients suffering from these diseases have poor paying capacity. To ensure that new drugs are created for patients suffering from these diseases, it is necessary to formulate an alternate paradigm of drug discovery process. The current model constrained by limitations for collaboration and for sharing of resources with confidentiality hampers the opportunities for bringing expertise from diverse fields. These limitations hinder the possibilities of lowering the cost of drug discovery. The Open Source Drug Discovery project initiated by Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, India has adopted an open source model to power wide participation across geographical borders.
Compare that to outfits like the one involved in Johnson & Johnson's TB drug
program, The Global Alliance for TB Drug Development (TB Alliance). The
NIH put a lot of taxpayer money into that.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public-Private Partnership Program is designed to facilitate collaborations to improve public health . . .NIAID uses solicitations to support public-private partnerships that stimulate private-sector investment in the development of innovative ideas, preclinical and clinical trials, and products that would otherwise be too risky to be considered by private companies. For example, public-private partnerships, such as ... the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development.
What a nice deal, the taxpayer finances the R&D, the corporation takes over the intellectual property rights, they make huge profits, Wall Street takes its dividends, and poor people around the world are denied access because the profit motive is all that matters. Yay for investment capitalism! Bringing a better world to everyone! Pffffttttt....
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