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Brazil Voids Merck Patent On AIDS Drug
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat May 05, 2007 01:19 PM
from the developing-world-revolt dept.
from the developing-world-revolt dept.
JoeBackward writes "Merck has this useful anti-AIDS drug Elfavirenz, and Brazil has lots of poor people with AIDS. So, after trying really hard to get Merck to cooperate on pricing, the Brazilian government has decided to take a 'compulsory license' to the patent, and get the drug from a factory in India. This compulsory license is basically a way to take the patent by eminent domain." This move gives Brazil one more thing in common with Thailand, both of which have blocked YouTube. Thailand's compulsory licensing of Elfavirenz and Plavix has landed the country on the US's watch list for piracy.
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ColinPL writes with a link to an AP article about a public scolding the US has given China, Russia, and several other nations. Failure to 'sufficiently protect' American copyrights is the cause of the Bush administration's ire, and has resulted in these countries showing up on a 'priority watch list' that could eventually lead to economic sanctions. "In addition to Russia and China, the 10 countries placed on the priority watch list were Argentina, Chile, Egypt, India,
Israel, Lebanon, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine and Venezuela. In elevating Thailand to the priority watch list, the administration said it was concerned by a range of issues including a 'deteriorating protection for patents and copyrights.' Thailand is currently in a dispute with international drug companies including Abbott Laboratories of the United States over the cost of drugs to fight AIDS and other diseases. The Thai government in January issued compulsory licenses allowing the use of much cheaper generic versions of two leading drugs in Thailand."
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humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
who can really put a price on that?
Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, it cost them a lot to make it. But this isn't a drug whose need is going to go away any time soon and trying to remake your investment quickly means that poor people can't buy something that can save their life. Crix whatever should've been priced in such a way so that 10-12 years down the road they began making a profit, not so that they start making profit almost immediately. I mean, what investor wouldn't invest in an AIDS drug just because they're not likely to recoup their losses within a year? We all know AIDS is going to be around for a while, cut your prices so that more people can get it.
But hey, just my opinion. Hopefully Brazil can start getting cheap crix out in their country and save some lives.
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Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Funny)
That being said, we might also want to remember that RIAA members need copyright durations of artist's death + 1000000 years in order to compensate for all those failed artists.
And let us not forget that not every hole exxon drills yields oil, which makes $3.50/gallon a reasonable price for 85 octane gas.
Furthermore, we should bear in mind that baby seals are vastly overpopulated
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Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Interesting)
Right. And in this case, the Brazilian government, whose AIDS policy is a model being copied by other countries worldwide, makes sure every single HIV and AIDS patient in Brazil has the medicines. It therefore has huge bargaining power, because it represents such a large number of patients. The former Health Minister, the man responsible for Brazil's AIDS policy, is José Serra, currently the governor of São Paulo state (think of it as being like holding the offices of governor of California and New York and you start to get an idea of the importance of that post). Before anyone cries for the poor drug companies, there are a few important facts you need to know. First, when Serra was still Health Minister, the drug companies decided to try to make more money since the government was buying up everything. They tried to increase their prices when they were already reaping massive profits (all these drugs are mature products in the "cash cow" phase of the product lifecycle, so the BS "paying for research" argument doesn't fly in this case) at the old price. And now the Brazilian government is asking that Merck charge the same price here as they charge in Thailand. And you can be sure Merck is not selling at that price in Thailand as a public service - they are making a profit there too.
When Serra originally went to the two largest makers of AIDS drugs that sell in Brazil, he showed them that the Brazilian constitution permits the Health Minister to determine that a given epidemic is an emergency situation, and in case of emergencies, the Federal Government, on the recommendation of the Health Minister, can break patents. Serra went to the companies and told them he didn't want to do that, but that they would have to negotiate with him in good faith or he would simply break their patents. As I recall, one went along and the other balked for a time, until they saw that Serra wasn't bluffing and was really going to allow Brazilian pharma companies to manufacture the patented drug. I'm surprised the president had to go this far, but the drug companies may have decided to improve their bottom line by doing a little gouging of AIDS patients in Brazil. I'm proud of the government for not knuckling under to Big Pharma. If only the US government would see that and be shamed into actually standing up to Big Pharma on any issue, any issue at all. Instead, you all (I fled 7 years ago) will have to deal with health care prices spiraling out of control until almost nobody can afford it. I have to tell you I'm happy to be in Brazil, a country that actually cares about its residents' health. Yes, I said RESIDENTS. I'm not even a citizen yet! Brazil isn't xenophobic like the USA either, and does not see me, an immigrant, as some kind of threat or some kind of outsider to be treated like crap. Contrast that with how immigrants are treated in the USA these days... I understand there were huge anti-immigration rallies in the USA last week.
Just a quick disclaimer: I think Serra was one hell of a great Health Minister. In addition to standing up to Big Pharma on AIDS drugs, he was also the one who successfully pushed for a law permitting generic drugs (before him, there were none in Brazil), something you can be sure the price gougers from Big Pharma were opposing every step of the way. Serra was really brave to stand up to them on those two points, and I'm proud of him for doing it. He also worked hard (from the executive branch) with the Brazilian Congress to pass a modern organ donation law in Brazil, basically doing away with the black market for transplantable organs that existed before. All that said, I don't think Serra would be much of a president, and I can't say I'm unhappy he lost in his bid for the presidency in 2002. I suspect he'll run again in 2010, because the current president, who is serving his second consecutive term and is still massively p
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Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Informative)
Talks over the price of Merck's drug, Efavirenz, broke off on Thursday when the health ministry rejected the New Jersey-based company's offer to cut its $1.59 per pill price by 30 percent. Brazil wanted to pay what Merck charges Thailand, or $0.65 per pill.
They TRIED to negotiate, and Merck put up a wall. So, in effect, Merck DID refuse Brazil.
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Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
So in Brazil, in fact, the dangers of AIDS are made very clear by the excellent educational portion of the AIDS policy. Further, unlike the USA, insane religious fanatics don't have the power to push idiocy like the "abstinence only" sex education pushed in a lot of places in the USA despite having been repeatedly proven not to decrease teen pregnancy at all, but proven to lead to increased incidence of STDs, including AIDS. So let me bounce it right backatcha and say it sure is nice to live in a country where the public interest is placed above the sensitivities of lunatics who want to impose their beliefs on others, even if imposition of those beliefs can be a death sentence.
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Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Not all moves to place fetters on the free market are the result of the hidden agendas of slavering, bloody thirsty autocrats, despite the media's attempt to make it seem so. The free market will not feed the poor, or give them medication or save their lives, as none of those activities are profitable. Ideas that save human life are the property of every human alive, and I will fight until the day I die the rights of people to unreasonably profit from or withhold those ideas from humankind. Those of you about to jump in with "but who'd pay for the research" arguments, pull your pants back up and get away from me. I've heard them all before and written on the subject [mrnaz.com] many times. If our society cannot place a value on the saving of life itself, then we need to have a good, long, hard look at the belief that our society is the greatest one on Earth.
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Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Interesting)
Flash-forward to the early 1980s and the frightening early years of the AIDS crisis where there was absolutely nothing in the way of effective treatments for the first six years of the epidemic. It was pure hospice care until the National Cancer Institute took another look at AZT and found that it was the first drug that HIV seemed to respond to. The patent was assigned to Burroughs-Wellcome who paid for drug trials and promptly began selling it two years later. Selling it at a price that made it the most expensive drugs ever marketed ($8,000+ a year per patient) - despite the fact it was developed with public money and was the only treatment available for a rapidly-spreading disease with a 100% mortality rate.
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Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
knowledge did
peopel living in the capitalist state took advantage of the fact they had that knowledge
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Re:This is a very slippery slope -when does this e (Score:5, Insightful)
There are several significant factors undercutting this supposed billion dollar price tag. The first is that AIDS research has received significant public funding, and second is that antiretroviral drugs have the shortest time to approval of any class of drugs, approximately half the time of normal clinical trials (the mean time for antiretrovirals is 44.6 months, compared to an industry average of 87.4 months).
See this report [thebody.com] from Doctors Without Boarders for more information.
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Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Interesting)
>Where do you think the research for the next AIDS drug will come from?
Mostly funded by taxpayers, then handed over to Big Pharma, as usual.
"...the pharmaceutical industry is not especially innovative. As hard as it is to believe, only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies, or the National Institutes of Health (NIH)."The Truth About the Drug Companies by Marcia Angell [nybooks.com]
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Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's some basic reading for you:
http://www.nationmultimedia.com/2007/04/21/opinio
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17244 [nybooks.com]
http://archive.salon.com/tech/htww/2006/01/13/dru
http://www.cepr.net/index.php?option=com_content&
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Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely silly. But it's a good measure here. Looks like Big Pharma's line of shit is considerably more effective than the RIAA and MPAA. Here's hoping they don't catch on.
Here's the reality of the situation. The biggest expense to Big Pharma is not research and development (which mainly takes place in universities, including a lot of public ones. Big Pharma does not fund those. You and I do.) It is not testing (and that could be handled entirely by the FDA, without their involvement at all. A lot of it already is. Big Pharma does not pay for the FDA. You and I do.) Their biggest expense is not manufacturing the pharmaceuticals, which, as should be obvious here, can be done pretty cheaply. Their biggest expense is wining, dining, and schmoozing doctors to use their medicines. To advertise on TV, to get patients to push doctors into getting them whatever medication that is. And to pay overpaid executives.
Let's cut out the middleman, and one of the biggest expenses here-the millions-per-year CEOs. Fund the universities well to develop the drugs. They will develop drugs for Third-World maladies, once the impetus to "make something you can sell" is gone. Have the FDA entirely in charge of testing, and farming out production-just production-to corporate entities. There we go.
Under the current system, there's far more incentive to look for treatments rather than cures. A treatment is a lifelong paycheck, a cure is a one-time payment. There's far too much impetus to develop Viagra rather than treatments for diseases that kill millions in poor countries. There's far too big a temptation to hold back a slightly-improved formulation until the patent on the current one is about to expire, and to use it to extend the patent far longer than it was intended to last. If that system collapses, I won't shed too many tears. Something better will replace it.
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Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Interesting)
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youtube (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:youtube (Score:5, Informative)
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"Black Box" Drugs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Right now, my understanding is that to produce and get approval for a drug, you need to release its chemical formula and other information about it.
But I wonder if at some point in the future, if the drug companies get too worried about their profits due to genericization in countries like Thailand and Brazil, that they might try to implement some sort of "drug DRM." Rather than making the composition of the drug open, don't release what's actually in it, and just test it as a 'black box,' show empirically through tests that it's effective and reasonably safe, but dope the actual pills with a lot of random substances that make it difficult to reverse-engineer (or have the actual drug only be something that's produced in the body through subtle combinations of various things in the pill, or keep the methods of producing the various chemicals in the pills a secret). I'm sure there are lots of bizarre ways that the drug companies could think up to protect the compositions.
Now, I'm not saying that any of these schemes would be effective at protecting the composition -- if the market for a generic drug is big enough, the labs in Thailand can probably afford to spend a lot of time with a mass spectrometer/gas chromatograph and unravel it, but that doesn't mean the drug companies wouldn't try, and waste a lot of time and effort in the process.
As we've seen in the battles over digital IP, there are a whole lot of things that can end up as collateral damage in the fights between rightsholders who see the gravy train slowing down, and people who want their products at a lower price than is being offered.
Re:"Black Box" Drugs? (Score:5, Insightful)
> and just test it as a 'black box,' show empirically through tests that it's effective and
> reasonably safe, but dope the actual pills with a lot of random substances that make it
> difficult to reverse-engineer
I really can't forsee any form of DRM for chemical compounds. It's quite like DRM for music - at one point the music has to be played on a speaker. Similarly, if you're going to make a drug, you're going to have to give the pill out at which point you have the whole field of analytical chemistry (mass spec, HPLC etc) at your disposal!
Furthermore, adding random substances to it, doesn't really hinder the identification process - they'd just show up as separate peaks on the spectrum. In addition randomly adding substances to a drug mixture would probably mess up pharmacokinetics which would have to be restudied all over again.
Unfortunately the chemical world is a little bit messier than the digital world
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Not without instructive precedent in the US (Score:5, Interesting)
Year 2007: Tens of thousand of people die in Brazil each year from AIDS because they cannot afford patented medication. Action from Brazil to force compulsory licensing is widely denounced as destroying the worldwide pharma industry, especially by US commentators.
Well...
Re:Not without instructive precedent in the US (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like the manufacturers couldn't produce the drugs, so the government stepped in to ramp up production. Not exactly what you made it sound like.
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The State giveth, the State taketh (Score:5, Insightful)
Patents are government-granted monopolies. It is not an absolute right and has to be balanced against the need of the People.
Reading this news as a fight between corporate greed and governmental greed is the wrong way to look at that. Right or wrong, you try to choose the lesser evil. Everyday the little citizen get crushed for reason of State, for once it is a big pharma that pays the price.
BTW, the pharma spammer are quick on the button today. Disgraceful.
Re:bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Mereck said no so Brazil took it to save the lives of its people.
Considering its a global company, They should have taken Brazils offer and looked to Europe and N.America to recover costs.
OTOH, since Merick wouldn't sell to Brazil anyways, there not actually loosing money now, are they?
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