Thailand's Health Ministry has announced it will break the patent of the anti-retroviral drug Efavirenz used to combat HIV/AIDS to allow for local production of the medicine, media reports said on Thursday.
The Government Pharmaceutical Organization (GPO) was expected to start making a generic version of the drug within six months following the ministry's decision Wednesday, said The Nation newspaper.
The GPO already manufactures a generic version of Nevirapine, one of the AIDS cocktails used to combat the pandemic but thousands of HIV-poisitive cases are known to be resistant to the drug.
Without access to a cheap version of Efavirenz, thousands of Nevirapine-resistant AIDS patient will likely die.
I don't hate the decision itself... although I do think it is wrong. I hate the fact that we live in a world where decisions like this have to be made.Unfortunately we do live in such a world.
Nobody is ignorant of the fact that it costs an astounding amount of money and time to bring a new drug to market. Paying the salaries of hundreds of scientists, paying for millions of dollars of custom laboratory equipment and running years of studies and followup. It's all a monstrous resource and capital-consuming expenditure.
Then, to have another entity, like the government of Thailand come along and say that they are going to steal all that work and give it away... causing the company which discovered the drug to lose millions upon millions of dollars... What's not to cause the next pharmaceutical company to just say "The hell with finding and creating better AIDS drugs" and shut down their operations?
We've got a President who - if he has done one thing right so far - has massively increased AIDS funding overseas. I've got a better idea: Instead of sending that money to Africa, why not work out a deal with the pharamceutical companies to compensate them for their losses and contract them to sell (or give away) their medications at a loss in poor nations? Why not get the other governments of the world (like Thailand) to do the same as well? It's their problem too.
Maybe they've tried this, and the pharmaceutical companies told them to get lost. I don't know. The companies probably thought that they could win a patent-infringement case in court.
Unfortunately, it is really tough to pit corporate profits against dying AIDS patients... just as it is really tough to justify Research and Development of products that are just going to wind up stolen.
That's why I hate decisions like this.
UPDATE:
Look under comments to see what one of my readers posted, taking the other side of the argument. Very interesting and his knowledge on this subject far surpasses my own.
4 comments:
I think you are much mislead in regards to drug development and pharmaceutical companies ' profit.
1. The Pharma industry does not make profit by selling highly specific and specialised drug such as ART but on the sale of generic medicine repackaged and sold under brand name. For example, there is a huge price difference between ibuprofen, the generic drug and Nurofen the brand name. Both are available over the counter but the pharma make profit on the sale of the second.
2. I suggest you to look at the report on this page where you will get more information about the reality linking IP and Pharma investment. http://www.undprcc.lk/web_bulletin/thailand.html
What Thailand is doing is not illegal. The World Trade Organization patent rules, known as Trade-Related Aspect of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), were introduced following the Uruguay round “in an attempt to narrow the gaps in the way [intellectual property] rights are protected around the world, and to bring them under common international rules”. However, the WTO’s TRIPS agreement recognizes the right of countries to protect public health. The DOHA declaration (2001) allowed the necessary flexibility in the application of TRIPS agreement to ensure that medicine are accessible at an affordable cost, that generic drugs can be produce and drugs imported at a lower cost than brands versions.
The US signed the Doha declaration and now tries to bypass it… Thanks to your President who receives large amount of money from the Pharma industry…
You should also wonder why none of the big pharma is willing to invest massively in research for other killer diseases such as malaria. I give you a tip: these diseases are not profitable.. They affect poor people who can't pay for the treatment...
Don't worry for the big pharma, the day they will loose money is not for tomorrow...
Thanks for that comment, Roger. I didn't study any of this before, and am (was) only thinking in pure economic terms. That's all highly informative and enlightening to me. Definitely appreciated!
You are welcome. From what I read in your post it was clear that you were not an appologist for the Pharmaceutical industry!
If you are interested, there was two articles from "defenders" of the Pharma in the Bangkok Post recently. Both are available on my website.
You will see that their approach is rather different. In both cases their argument has been rebutted by MSF or other.
The baseline is that in thailand 800,000 people and certainly more are HIV positive. Less than 10 % receive treatment. A treatmen that will become inefficient at some point and will require new drugs that are more expensive.
Treatment is free within the limit of 5000 baht per month per patient under the health system if one works. This includes ALL treatments (HIV and other diseases), meaning that if the cost goes over, the patient has to pay, if he can not, then he will have to choose which of his diseases won't be treated (minimum wage in Bangkok is less than 180 baht a day. Some people work for much less than that, 100 baht a day, not declared...).
When someone die of Aids, it could be a teacher, an administator, a farmer, the familly breadwinner... AIDS deaths have trememdous consequences on the society as a whole as they remove key elements. It migh be that one day there wil be nobody to buy ART...
PEPFAR is already used to buy medicine, but not enough and not in Thailand.
But I am getting carried away... The economics of HIV/AIDS is a complex business with a lot of vested interests...
Regards
Yup. It's definitely a complex business.
Still though... finding a cure for AIDS takes money, and no private enterprise is going to spend that money if they aren't going to get it back eventually. That's the sad fact of capitalism: Shareholders before humanity.
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