Reuters – Thu 25 Jan 2007 8:58:13 GMT:
Thailand’s army-installed government has issued compulsory licences for cheap versions of a heart disease and an AIDS drug, the health minister said on Thursday, a move likely to enrage global pharmaceutical giants.
“The laws have been signed and they are now effective,” Health Minister Mongkol na Songkhla told Reuters.
Mongkol said the drugs were for treatment of HIV-AIDS and heart disease, but declined to confirm newspaper reports they were Abbott’s
Kaletra, and Plavix, a blockbuster anti-clotting agent sold by Sanofi-Aventis and Bristol-Myers Squibb . He cited the ballooning costs of treatment as the reason for the move.
“We have to do this because we have so many patients to treat with so little budget. We can’t watch our people die and their patents have been here for so long,” Mongkol said.
“It’s very, very worrying when companies’ intellectual property rights are not supported within a country,” said Judy Benn, executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Thailand.
Topic of the day, what is a government’s primary duty: Protecting the life of its citizens or the intellectual property of foreign corporations?
If IP don’t license the technology at affordable rates, screw them.
I think countries have to protect their citizens, but the companies and the people that work for them are also citizens. However until he “citizens” within companies start taking a wider view, then governments should protect the majority citizens first. Of course if you live in the US, protecting big companies (donations???) is most important
Boo-friggin’-hoo. Hmm… Save lives? Make money? Save lives? Make money?
I think we all know where big business’ priorities lie.
Someone throw me a friggin’ bone here.
5. “Got to laugh when people say the markets solve everything…”
The market doesn’t work here because governments have been handing out virtual monopolies like candy, i.e., patents. You can’t praise the free market and at the same time hand out monopolies.
Get rid of patents and let a real free market take its course.
At the end of the day, intellectual property rights is all the United States economy is going to have left to export. If they remain this easy to pilfer, our future balance of trade looks bleak.
IP = money & money = drugs & drugs = life & life = r&d & r&d = IP
its cyclical
Stealing patents sounds like a good idea, but it also means there’s very little property rights in your own country, so very few people will try to invest in property there, or develop the property they have. Thailand is writing itself a path to perpetual poverty.
Drug industry likes to say that they may big bucks because they “save lives”, so I looked at the top ten drugs listed. Three of them (advair, zyprexa, and risperdal) have had reports that they actually result in increased deaths. A number of the top 10 drugs are really no better than generics (prevacid, nexium, norvasc, effexor). #1 selling Lipitor lowers cholesterol great, but it has never been shown to save lives as has #2 Plavix. The only drug that can claim to save lives on the top ten list is Zocor, and it has the worst side effect profile of all the cholesterol pills.
We can’t watch our people die and their patents have been here for so long,” Mongkol said. There is no doubt the AIDS drugs prolong life, but outside of that, it is amazing to me that the drug companies have even convinced the people stealing from them of the so called benefits of their products.
#13, SN
An extremely powerful statement. I don’t know if you took that explanation of IP from a textbook or made it up, but I found it very illuminating.
While I do favor some IP protection, I grant your post is a very powerful argument.
#15, jz
Another powerful argument. In my opinion, substance will always win over blather.
I would love to be contacted by Murray to hear more firsthand info about the Thai situation. And perhaps to invite Murray to do a guest blog entry on our blog at http://www.policybytes.org
tomg@ipi.org
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