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Violating A Patent As Moral Choice
kuzmich writes "The Taiwanese government has announced that it will violate patent laws to manufacture a drug that can help fight bird flu virus. In doing so, they have spelled out their reasoning very clearly: 'We have tried our best to negotiate with Roche, it means we have shown our goodwill to Roche and we appreciate their patent. But to protect our people is the utmost important thing'. Not being in Taiwan, this makes me wonder how bad the situation would have to be for some of the other governments to follow a path of violating patent and copyright laws for the benefit of the general population. Are there precedents, procedures for doing so?"
Patent laws are far more important than human lives; what gives them the right to do this?
Just kidding, of course. Good for Taiwan. Patent laws should not cause the death of people.
They have their priorities straight. Stopping a potential pandemic is more important than not stepping on a businessman's toes.
Risky move, considering the support of the United States is what keeps them from being a province of China...
It seems to me that in a case such as this, it would be perfectly acceptable to invoke the principle of Eminent Domain. If this isn't a situation that involved the public's interest, I don't know what is!
Go Taiwan!
I'm a big retard who forgot to log out of Slashdot on Mike's computer! LOOK AT ME.
No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, isn't it, eh? Beautiful plumage!
"laws are a human institution!" sure they'll get in trouble, but why not do what's best for humanity?
This proves it...the bird flu was a virus developed by the communist anti-profit evil open source devils in order to thward patents! I say we execute all of the murdring commies for this devestating blow to the world economy!
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
to eliminate chinese loot farmers in world of warcraft...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
This happened routinely during WWII in the US with patents and forced licensing agreements for technology deemed crucial to the war effort. Even my own great grandfather's manufacturing business (springs) was confiscated due to his ethnic background.
A billion dead World wide versus honoring the patent, tough call ;)
If this was done for AIDS who knows what it would be like these days.
And no vaccine...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This may be a good trend, if other governments follow suit. What would the precedent be now if someone found a proven cure for a disease - say, AIDS or Leukemia - but could not put it out into the world because the gene it was based off of was patented?
What about the concept of "eminent domain", such as what exists in the 'states. Wouldn't that apply here?
Patent laws essentially make private property out of ideas/designs/etc. Eminent domain is the legal right of government to take private property if the need arises. It's usually applied for things like public works (roads and the like), but I can see an equivalent application in emergency situations like a looming viral outbreak.
I would assume that legally they can do this if their laws have a provision for seizure of private property in times of emergency. Of course, IANAL, and I know exactly zilch about Taiwanese law, but it seems too obvious a legal provision not to have.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Good luck to 'em all, I say; saving lives trumps patents.
can be protected by keeping it secret. This applies to any 'process' that you want to protect.
Patent law gives a 17-year monopoly to the first one to invent something, irrespective of whether the time to independently rediscover it would be one week or one century.
By keeping it secret, you get a monopoly for the exact time it takes for someone else to independently rediscover the invention. This is both simple and fair for inventions that cannot be easily reverse-engineered.
Wikipedia sez:
...an interpretive statement, the Doha Declaration, was issued in November 2001, which indicated that TRIPs should not prevent states from dealing with public health crises. Since then PhRMA, the United States and, to a lesser extent, other developed nations, have been working to minimise the effect of the declaration. TRIPs provides for "compulsory licencing", which allows a national government to issue a licence for the production of drugs without the consent of the patent owner as long as those drugs are primarily for the domestic market. A 2003 agreement loosened the domestic market requirement, and allows developing countries to export to other countries where there is a national health problem as long as drugs exported are not part of a commercial or industrial policy [1]. Drugs exported under such a regime may be packaged or colored differently to prevent them from prejudicing markets in the developed world.
Okay, so a philosopher, a philologist, and a philatelist walk into a bar...
Reminds me of the scene in Knights of the Old Republic, in the Taris Undercity, where you kill a group of Sith troopers, steal the Sith-deveoped rakghoul antidote from their corpses, bring it to an independent doctor - and receive light-side points because he'll make more of the antidote and give it away freely.
Of course you feel like it's the light-side choice when you're playing the game, but think of the Sith researchers who probably have nothing to do with the empire's evil policies. They aren't getting compensated at all for their efforts (which were intended to save people's lives), and probably don't survive the destruction of Taris. Or are they also in the same category as building contractors on the second Death Star?
Is it reasonable to claim that the Sith researchers as well as the Tamiflu scientists are in a category of people who don't do enough good? (That is, good job for joining a field where your work saves people's lives, but you should be a lot more altruistic when people's lives are, after all, at stake.)
First they make you spend tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in regulatory rescosts to pass their tests.
Then they allow tort laws to get out of control, letting you get sued for billions.
They make you wait a decade for approval (or not).
They offer you a monopoly on your invention.
Then they take it back so their friends and family in pharmaceuticals can make it with zero of your costs involved.
It's similar to poorer countries like Africa and China using stolen copies of Windows. They can't be expected to pay for it.
Actually, it's not like that at all. You're not going to die if you can't obtain your own copy of Windows 2000. Your analogy is more akin to saying "I can't afford a new computer, so I will go to Best Buy and steal one." Just because you don't have enough money for something doesn't mean you have the right to obtain it through other means. This situation is what they call "dire". Stealing copies of software for your poor is what they call "cheating to get ahead".
Rex is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Patent laws already have procedures for forced licensing (I am not sure I used the correct legal terms).
If a patent owner refuses to practice his patent in a country with such a legal provision, and he refuses to license other parties to practice the patent - then a potential licensee can obtain a forced license after court appeal.
The party, which obtained a forced license, then pays royalties to the patent owner at rate set by the court.
In Israel, there was such a case several years ago. A company registered a patent in Israel on a certain medication, and then refused to sell it in Israel or license its manufacture to an Israeli company. The reason was that the company in question wanted to do business with Arab countries, and they would boycott it if it did business also with Israel.
An Israeli company got a forced license and manufactured the medication in question.
If I am not mistaken, the Israeli company in this case was Teva.
Brazil announced a few years ago that it would not honor patents for some AIDS drugs. They said that the governement would be making and distributing the drugs for free and Phizer or whomever it was could go jump in the lake.
Oh yes, here it is.
People invest great amounts of money into the creation of information, which is then infinitely reproduceable, and the only way for them to be compensated is to only allow use of that information by those who can afford to pay. There has to be another way, but I can't imagine one that isn't very problematic in other areas. It's hard to seperate those who can't pay from those tho don't want to, justify your methods of discrimination, prevent exploitation of loopholes, etc.
"Bird flu has killed at least 60 people in Asia since December 2003" Sixty people died in two years, oh no, if we don't cure it soon we'll all be dead!!! No offence, but is this really something we need to be worrying about?? Doesn't normal flu kill more people per year?
Well, there's always eminent domain. That's a similar concept in the US, where a method is as tangible property as a piece of land is. Some might say owning a process and owning a piece of land both make no sense...
--LWM
The moral dimensions to mass produced antibiotics and antivirals are more complex than just the issue of patents.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Both Brazil and South Africa breach (anti)AIDS drug patents to get enough of the stuff without bankrupting their government coffers. We all know it takes a lot of money and time to develop drugs, but often once they are discovered they can be replicated easily and cheaply.
You guys had a riot on account of me? My very own riot? - Jayne Cobb
And in completely unrelated news Roche has decided to stop all research related to the bird flue virus.
Also, Slashdotters still can't seem to be able to see more than 2 inches in front of their faces. Must be all that starting at the computer screens that is the cause of this massive epidemic of myopia.
Is another Taiwanese company making and profiting form the drug?? I firmly believe that patents should not get in the way of human rights, emergencies, etc. - however, if another company (or Government for that matter) profits from sale - Why have patents?
Enlightenment is a pipe dream. So where's the pipe?
The most fundamental purpose of a government is to manage the country for the benefit of the people.
The Taiwan government is 100% right. It is doings its JOB! It is, more or less, legally obliged to provide these drugs in the event of an outbreak, and by extention is obliged to stockpile them in the run up.
Roche is simply trying to make a profit some might say. Well, in this case, Roche's profit motive is in direct conflict with the safety of every citizen in Taiwan. This isn't even a hard call.
This story brings to mind the recent decision to allow the military indistrial complex to ignore a patent, in the interests of national security.
May the Maths Be with you!
...due to possible US influence. However if it is the PRC that is doing this instead I would be expecting a swift but tactful diplomatic response.
On a tangent here, but hasn't Brazil been manufacturing some pharmaceuticals for quite some time now without the corresponding approval from patent holders?
It's not quite the same thing but close enough (emergency situations), but I heard that the US Government voided many radio patents beginning/during WW2 in the interest of advancing that technology ASAP.
I'd love to find a direct link to info, but all I can find know is this website alluding to that:
http://www.daltonlp.com/daltonlp.cgi?item_id=97
AC comments get piped to
India and Brasil come to mind. There isn't a whole lot the drug company can do about it. That is the soft underbelly of patent law. If a foreign government chooses to allow a domestic company to ignore the patent for distribution within that country, there isn't a whole lot the patent holder can do about it.
I for one would have modded this up. Do what you will, it's not as if karma matters.
already notified Roche that if they cannot produict enough of the bird flu vaccine in the next few weeks, the government will also break the patent and allow generics to be produced by competitors. I don't have a link (picked it up on NPR).
"Saying that Linux is inferior to Windows because more people use Windows is like saying that all restaurants are inferi
Several nations already do this with AIDS drugs, and much like Taiwan, only after negotiations fail. This is a perfect example of the perversion of the modern US patent system. The patent system is designed to encourage innovators to share as much knowledge as possible for the benefit of everyone. If patent holders want to play chicken with sovereign nations over matters of global security, they can expect this kind of thing to happen.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
The Wright Brothers got their patents on Airplanes revoked by the US during/before the first worldwar. And never got them back. So, yes such a thing happened before.
It is the same with some countries and drugs against Aids. South Africa I think, has officially violated patents to allow cheaper mass production of drugs to help people with Aids.
. . . new drugs to treat the flu? This is why pharmaceutical companys don't want to invest in drugs like Tamiflu. As soon as they try to recoup their investment people say they are greedy and call for the patent to be forfited. Well, there is no free lunch. Policies like this may achieve a short term goal, but in the long run there will be fewer treatments for the worlds most deadly illnesses.
...And probably no treaties either. The treaties have explicit provision for compulsory licensing.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
A comment that is quite actually relevant, unbiased (as it consists mostly of a quote) and is very much applaudable. We need more of this on slashdot.
And the lesson for Roche? Get out of the business of inventing life-saving vaccines.
Just how many companies do we need wasting their time on such things?
not quite, there is no open source alternative to the vaccine.
-- lol pwned
And of course, infringing on a patent is not theft.
Seriously, even if you think it's inmoral (I personally don't think ideas should have a propietary) you should at least realize that it's pretty different from stealing something. The whole idea that there can be "theft" when we're talking about intellectual property is just a way to try and make it look worse than it is.
diegoT
Now, the US Constitution guarantees reasonable compensation for seized property. This doesn't have to be cash. It can be some other equitable consideration.
For example, if Disney would surrender almost all of their old television cartoons and theatrical movies into the public domain (where they should have lapsed years ago), the US could reciprocate and give a *permanent* protection for a few of their most prized revenue source characters: Mickey Mouse and Disney's Ariel (the Little Mermaid). The population could make whatever artistic mashup they wanted from the footage, but they couldn't claim the Mouse as theirs or claim the Mouse speaks for them. If I understand, this is somewhat like the protection Britain has given Peter Pan: it's a special cultural treasure and is handled different from other properties.
Another example is for pharmaceuticals: break an effective AIDS drug patent, and we'll let you keep a certain lifestyle drug like Viagra for a longer period.
Unfortunately, Disney and Pfizer have bought enough Senators to choke the Panama Canal, and so the trade in all of their products will be protected nearly forever anyway, even without surrendering the cultural feedstock and the life-saving inventions to society as a whole.
[
international laws and treaties, humanrights and military procedures for wartimes and so forth.
they humiliate captives, publically show prisoners of war, torture and do worse things not only in guantanamo bay and abu-ghureib and many other places on this planet.
who does america give a shit about when it comes to their interests. they want to own this whole planet, no matter what. they are the actual rulers of this planet.
so how come ppl start wondering if other governments also give shit about international treaties like patent laws, nuclear weapons/power treaties and so forth.
this whole planet is going mad, and everybody is just fingerpointing at each other, rather than starting to do some good for this planet and mandkind and start to do as you want to be done unto yourself.....
... isn't the point of intellectual property supposed to be the public's interest?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Don't forget that during the Anthrax-in-the-Post scare, that most evil of all nations, Canada, declared that they would violate patents to produce vaccines for their citizens.
Its a difficult balance. On one hand, it does take a lot of research to develop novel drugs. However, a lot of drug development is based on "change every possible side-chain on a drug we know works and patent it in case its good for something".
I don't see how to fix this. Ideally, a company could patent the active part of a drug molecule so that it wouldn't need to patent every possible variation to protect itself from rivals, but given that its not actually know why certain drugs work, that would be impossible.
Maybe a change to patent law stating that the government could repossess a patent in moments of national crisis would be sensible. If they can take your house, your care and even your kids (conscription), why not patent rights?
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
I know that I don't. I agree with your sentiment, btw, except that I'm not sure that the bird flu doesn't rise to the level of violating patent law. I think you might be right, but I suspect they know more about the possible pandemic than you do.
The analogy I've seen is to New Orleans. By the time the flood hit, it was too late to fix the levys. Similarly, if the bird flu pandemic does hit humans, at that point it might be too late to begin producing these drugs.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Way to go Roche. It seems like you've gotten a lot of bad pubblicity. It's exactly in times like this that companies should forget for a second their greed, help for the sake of doing so, and get an image boost in the eyes of a big part of the world.
diegoT
Brazil broke the patents for some anti-aids drugs. First, we negotiate the prices with the labs, they refuse to provide an acceptable price, then the patent were broke for the sake of thousands of people. "Under World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, a nation can break drug patents if there is a national emergency." At the time, we receive nice comments from leaders from all over the world, including Tony Blair in an MTV program. read more on: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4059147.stm http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/americas/08/22/ aids.drug/
This is my first comment, and sorry about the poor english.
Not being in Taiwan, this makes me wonder how bad the situation would have to be for some of the other governments to follow a path of violating patent and copyright laws for the benefit of the general population. Are there precedents, procedures for doing so?"
Yes. Please place a briefcase containing unmarked bills under the third park bench at precisely 6:00 pm. My "associates" will meet with you there.
Many jurisdictions refuse to acknowledge patents on certain medical procedures. For example, if a person devised a new procedure for conducting surgery that reduced the chance of death, then they could not patent, and demand royalties when it is performed (or more extremely prevent the procedure being used if a person could not afford to pay.
Patents involve a careful ballancing act. On the one hand, a person or company invested a certain level of creative, and financial resources expanding the the public knowledge. In exchange for sharing this knowledge, they are granted a monopoly for a short period of time.
Pharmaceutical companies invest billions of dollars creating new drugs, but they then inevitably price the drugs outside the range of many people (especially in third world countires.) After 20 years, the patent expires, and everyone else is entitled to manufacture the drug. Of course with the circumstances around the birdflu scare, it is irrelevant that the drug will be widely availale and cheap in 2 decades, as potentially hundreds millions of people will die in the intervening time.
Now many racist people blamed these problems on the fact that persons were not American, or not white, or not whatever. This, of course, is hogwash. Criminals and evil come in all colors, as is shown in this case. Tamiflu may or may not work in all cases. There has already been one Tamiflu resistant case. So we have no idea wheather Tamiflu will do any good. OTOH, the world is scared, and looking for any solution, and Roche can ask for whatever it wishes, if they choose to do so.
Now I am not one to say that drug prices are too high. Companies should be compensated at whatever the market will bear, when the market is in a normal state. The Tamiflu market is not normal. We are buying something that might never be used, and likely won't be used in the process of normal market visits, but must be stockpiled to protect national interests.
So what is Roche going to do. Protect the fiction that Tamiflu can only be manufacted by roche, even though Asia has shown technical expertise at manufacturing all sort of medical products. If they do so, will they build a plant that will manfufacture the drug for government use, and give discounts for the mass order. Or will they do what they are doing now, which is taking advantage of desperate situation. Many would say this is exactly what we expect from an industry that allows thousands to die of AIDS in an effort to protect patent rights.
At some point we must demand that the massive government subsidize pay for something. Roche can profit greatly from this scare, and win a great deal of public support, if it plays the hand correctly. They are likly to recieve a billion+ dollar order from the US alone. Cutting the price to cover only fixed costs might be indicated.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I am writing this comment under the following assumptions:
1) The sole duty of government is to serve the people
2) Patent laws are a creation of the government, designed to protect a specific class of people called 'inventors'.
With these two assumptions in mind, if the government feels that the needs of the people as a whole, outweigh the needs of a small group of people protected by a law, it is within the government's authority to abrogate said law, in general or in the specific instance.
Therefore in my opinion it is appropriate for the Taiwanese government to choose not to honor Roche's patent, if it feels the need for a bird flu vaccine is of greater importance to its citizens, than is Roche's patent.
That having been said, the Taiwanese government should (and likely has) carefully deliberate over the matter before deciding to act.
While in pinciple I fully agree that it's wrong to deny a drug for costs reason, I'm wondering where the limit is. Drugs save lives (well, the right one at the right time). Should they then all be free ? In every country ? For everyone ? Then we need to nationalize drugmaking... I can't wait for all the innovation that'll ensue.
Maybe there should be some kind of balance, depending on disease severity, cost, maybe a stadard price for emergency cases...
All of which is not discussed here... I'm really wondering what you guys are basing your opinions on.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
care to enliten the community, so that we can all take part in your discussions?
This isn't as clear cut as the state taking someone's house and land to build a highway, in which case the person can only lose the land once and would be left with nothing. Instead, the drug company will still fully own its IP after the fact, they will only have lost some virtual sales. Taiwan appears to only want to produce the drugs to save lives, but not to profit off of its sales to other parties.
If anything, the company should be able to claim the amount of the price that Taiwan didn't buy as some kind of charitable deduction. But if they try to sue Taiwan for saving lives, then they really should win the "Evil Moneygrubbing Bloodsuckers of the Year" award.
make world, not war
Your analogy is more akin to saying "I can't afford a new computer, so I will go to Best Buy and steal one."
No, it's more like "I will go examine a computer at Best Buy, and build a copy of it."
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
>There'd be no patent.
>And no vaccine...
And in my own opinion, dare I say.... no virus.
Although, imo, maybe that applies more for companies like PharmaCIA.
Interesting that Companies like MONSANTO, a company that is GMO'ing the worlds food supply, will piss & moan when researchers suggest that these frankenfoods (frankenstein+food) are dangerous for us and our health, and possibly CREATING a lot of these new illnesses - when their other/parent company and pharmaceutical giant, PharmaCIA/Pfizer.
PharmaCIA was originally owned by the Swedish government apparently. Interesting name choice.
The opinion of some might be that they are knowningly and intentionally making us ill via our food stuffs, in order to have another one of their companies cure...err treat (often "for life") us with their magic pills.
Isn't that a conflict of interests or collusion or a terrorist act against the people or something?
Should a company that modifies our food in a way that is potentially dangerous to our health also be allowed to manufacture medicine?
..is all but necessary as the continued pattern of privilege and discontent
must be halted at this point. Once governmental decisions impact on
foreign benificiaries GNP we have an obligation to right the normally
untouchable wrong with military force. It is the correct and time
proven way to deal with foreign intransigence regardless of cooperative
governmental history.
"laws are a human institution!"
Yes, indeed. Patents are just priviledges granted by governments to inventors. In cases of emergency, it is perfectly justifiable for governemnts to temporarily revoke such priviledges. Things like this happen all the time worldwide. This is just a case of greed vs. common sense. And it's great that common sense prevailed in this case. Roche should have struck a deal with the taiwanese government while they were negotiating, but they were just too greedy. Too bad for them; and great for the general public.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
The WTO Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) allows compulsory license of medicines for public health reasons. The Wikipedia entry gives a decent overview in the "access to essential medicines" section.
This is a hot topic in the international trade community for developing countries, especially in relation to AIDS drugs.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one...
Click here or here.
A lot would be fixed if copyright/patent/IP laws couldn't be prosecuted outside of the civil courts if the defendant wasn't profiting.
I'm just saying kids downloading MP3s/movies/games shouldn't waste the federal courts time or money. Not to mention having a criminal record for something like that is insane. Keep copyright/IP problems in the civil courts if there's no profiting.
This is similar to using knowledge gained though human suffering to benefit
another human. Someone has made a sacrifice and they are not being
compensated for it. I don't think you can get mad at either side, it just
illustrates the limits of the paten system. Many times governmental
laws breaks down like the laws of physics, in singularities.
If people feel this is such an instance, then it should be over looked
as such. If people feel that we need a stiffer punishment for
countries that do this, then so be it.
In my honest humble opinion, the government and people of Taiwan by this
action are saying that they don't believe in the system. If they did,
they would be willing to die for it, since they are not, all this does is
illustrate thier standpoint.
Curcmin/(Tumeric) apparently has similar effects of Tamiflu (at least, from what I've read out there on the net)
But you might want to take a curcumin supplement with a standardized amount of curcumin in it. I've read that you might have to use a ton tumeric to get the desired results.
Do your own research of course. This could be a life or death situation.
The article does not say where the negotiations have broken down but my suspicion is Roche is probably trying to gouge money. Having caveatted that, lets see. Choose not to violate a law, wait on the legalities meander through what ever twists and turns it may take and watch who knows how many people die. Or short circuit the process............., well I think the choice is obvious. The health of the people win out.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
According to the story, the Taiwanese government wasn't able to "secure permission to copy the drug" even though a government official said "We have tried our best to negotiate with Roche". The story doesn't say why negotiations failed. That seems like important information. Was Taiwan unwilling to pay a fair price? Was Roche afraid of offending bully China? What was the problem?
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
We have to get our priorities right. Laws were created for humans to live in a reasonably stable and safe society with minimal difficulties. Then society "developed" and see where we are now, especially with respect to patents etc.
If there was any time to say "fuck the Law, let's have Justice," this is ne of them. Especially when it comes to people dying and purchased laws.
== Posting as AC for a good reason.
The founders could not have foreseen the development of modern small arms and the potential danger from the few that would cause harm with firearms outweigh their overall value.
What bullshit, but hey, if it works for them...
The founders could not have foreseen the productivity, production, and distribution capabilities enabled by modern technology and the potential danger from the few that would cause harm with patents outweigh their overall value.
You've piqued my curiosity - if the drug industry doesn't foot the research bill, who does?
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Listen to Greg Glaros US Navy Commander of the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation. The USA is being outmaneuvered in business.
Mod parent up please. Denial of a fair price on a drug necessary to the health of a society is an attack on that society and any society has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Government's first and foremost duty is the protection of the society in which it governs. Taiwan, or any other governement, has the right to secure medicine deemed necessary to the lifes of its people in any way it can including seizure within its domain of formula, manufacturing facilities, supplies of the drug or reverse engineering of the drug. Taiwan would only overstep these bounds if it produced the drug and sold it for profit to other countries.
If this were to happen a few times around the world the drug companies would be more diligent in applying the varied pricing scheme they now use around the world. Most countries pay far less then the price, for example, that Americans pay for drugs from American drug companies. Many Americans often travel to Canada or Mexico to purchase the same drugs or generic variations for a lot less then they would have to pay in America. Hundreds of dollars or more for drugs that cost pennies to manufacture is absurd. Forget the research costs because these are some of the most profitable companies in the world. Once developed drugs are like software, they cost near nothing to duplicate in most cases.
(or Government for that matter)
Here a government is developping a clone of a drug because they can't get it cheaply/fast/in sufficient quantities for their needs. I agree with you that enterprises should not be allowed to profit from a copy of someone else's pattent, but here the Taiwanese government is trying to protect its citizens, not make dinero off a drug. Big difference!
First you have to show that the food is potentially dangerous before you use it against people who realize that organic food could only ever feed a small fraction of the world.
It doesn't appear that Taiwan honors foreign patents via treaty: http://www.bpmlegal.com/pctco.html http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/plt/ , but I may be wrong.
The US has done basically the same thing with US patents which have "national security" implications. In the US, the Constitutional authority for patents lies in Congress, so Congress is perfectly free to decide whether patent protection should/is offered for such things. I don't profess to know such specifics about Taiwan.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The implication being that this is a huge drain on the pharmcos resources, and they therefore need "special protection". The truth is that whatever the actual R&D budget is, the big pharmcos all spend at least twice as much on marketing.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
When looking at the long term effects in this situation, you have to remember what the situation actually is. If they don't do this, for instance, then there's a very good chance that an epidemic may arise, and they would not be prepared to deal with it. Even if it doesn't result in mass death, the economy would still be in shambles. And if it does, then the corporate economy will be the last thing on peoples' minds.
So it's pointless to focus so completely on the future economy, especially if that future economy is going to be destroyed or radically changed, as would happen in a pandemic situation. This isn't a situation of helping a few people who got AIDS because they had unprotected anal sex. This is a situation where the lifeblood of the economy itself, the labour, will be devastated. And without a labour force, an economy is nothing.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
A Patent is a grant of property from the Sovereign (i.e. the legal state, whether that be the "People" or the "Crown" or the "Republic"). Most people define "property" as having a set of legal (usually exclusive) rights to possess, enjoy, and dispose of some thing. All property flows from the Sovereign. The Sovereign either grants it directly (as in a patent for land or intellectual property) or he recognizes it through enacting laws. The "Real" in real estate does not mean true, but litteraly "Royal". You may like to think that its *your* property because of some moral reason (like you earned it or made it yourself), but legally it is only yours because the Sovereign says so through his laws.
Since property and patents are at the pleasure of the Sovereign, the Sovereign is free to revoke it at any time. This is called escheat. In fact, if you die without an heir, your property automatically escheats to the Sovereign.
So, a Soveriegn of a State, can legally revoke any patent of his own granting at any time. Other than because of a treaty obligation, a Sovereign State need not recognize or allow a Patent granted by another state.
Here in the US, our Founders were well aware (and sometimes the personal victims) of the abuses and escheats at the hands of the British Sovereign. So all the above was modified by our constitution which says that property may not be seized except with "due process of law". The Congress has also set up horrible "patent and copyright" laws. Obviously, Taiwan has different laws.
Excuse my ignorance, I'm from the US. What is this "benefit of the general population" you speak of?
The reason we subjugate ourselves to law is to better procure justice. If law does not accomplish this purpose then it m
I seriously almost fell out of my chair when I read that
By reading this, you have given me brief control of your mind.
Yeah marketting is expensive look at the annual reports.
On page 60 of Mercks 2004 annual report
2004 Merck spent
$4.9B on Materials and Manufacturing
$7.3B on Marketting & Administration
$4B on R&D
To be fair the administration expenses should be a large part of that expense, but it seems clear that more money is spent on researching and producing the drugs than selling them.
Taiwan claims they tried to negociate in good faith. Time will tell. They need the drug now, so the immediate action is justified. However we should expect that Roche will sue the Taiwanese government. If they are sincere, I would expect that they would ignore all orders to stop production, but would also settle any reasonable financial demand (oh, in the amount of the market value of the amount of drug they produced). If they do that, then the public need is satisfied AND the financial rights of Roche are also protected.
Ayn Rand would love this one.
Drug research costs a lot of money. I know Drug companies can get greedy at times, but even if you were running at cost you would be spending tens of millions on research.
If this was a one shot magic bullet cure for cancer, aids, ect I think few would object to the suspension of the normal rules.
Unfortunatly, Aids gets resistant rapidly to the current generation of drugs, so you have to have a constant ammount of research going into it (more money).
But if the drugs are outragiously expensive, people die.
If no one pays the drug companies for the research, they might abandon it and more people would die.
I think a balance needs to be struck, either with government funding or an agreement to sell the current drugs nearer to what they actually cost the companies.
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation!
What you have here is a case of two evils. To ignore patent law to save people, or to ignore people to give into greed. The drug companies are out to make money. Not something anyone should readily discourage. However, its also a fact that many companies are doing so at the great expanse of lives or what value there drug really has.
Point in fact, for any specific drug. There is generally as much marketing money spent as R&D money spent. Often times quieting the facts of studies made or of even the true effectiveness of said drugs.
As well, often times the base research for said patents comes from Tax dollars.
Now, evils aside of the "Innocent" victims.
Bird Flu and it's variants is feared to be a global killer should it ever make it into the population at large. To not allow it to be reigned in early on would be a crime committed by all and any soverign nation. How would you like to see 1/10th of the US nationality wiped out because we wouldn't allow anyone access to such drugs? (Probably an over dramatization, but historically has happened)
Also, would research really go away??? The answer is Hell No. Research will still go on, by those who care. It went on before there where Biological Patents. It would go on after too. Penecillan didn't come about because of potentially making a multi millionairre out of the CEO.
Our Patent system is currently extremely innaccurate on what its true purpose is, which is just compenstaion. There should be a feasibilty limit on what anyone can charge for a patent in relation to its true development costs and difficulty of Idea.
They only made a drug that made the user suicidal, marketed the drug to usually depressed teenagers, hid the fact when they knew, they wouldn't admit it when all the evidence pointed to it, and they wouldn't put the warning on the drug in all countries when some places forced them to admit the problem.
This is after they hid the fact that it caused hideous birth defect in pregnant women and were forced to admit that after the drug went on the open market.
Accutane
Accutane Action Group
-Mikey P
The last bird flu pandemic killed 50 million people. Do you blame Taiwan for being afraid? Asia gets much worse disease outbreaks than we do.
A top health official said Taiwan had demonstrated its goodwill to Roche in talks - and the country hoped it would eventually secure permission to copy the drug.
It's not like they're taking it and saying "sucks to be you."
AIDS is not a pandemic. You can't get AIDS by sharing someone's bread or by touching a doorknob that's been coughed on. Yes, AIDS is a serious and deadly disease, but it is not a pandemic. The last bird flu we've had was a pandemic. If this bird flu turns out to be not as serious as it's thought to be, then Taiwan can easily stop producing the drug, the drug wouldn't sell very much anyway, and there's no problem.
As long as countries don't do this for every disease that comes up, there's no problem. Not every disease out there is considered a pandemic or an epidemic.
And drug companies make a lot of money off non-disease related drugs too. Viagra? Liptor? I'd imagine those are all huge money making drugs.
To become incorperated you need to offer a service to the people of your nation, you are commited to serve your government.
If these companies won't negotiate with other countries and their government is unwilling to step in (As they would do to serve their own citizens) then there really is no good reason not to violate the patent.
The points the previous post makes should rate at least a 4, not a 2 as they do at the time I post this...
US courts regularly declare foreign patents void if it benefits the US economy. The US generally does what is best for it's economy (and in second line it's people), regardless of international treaties or global interest.
There are definitely tremendous economic pressures to encourage recurring treatment costs over cure. The flip side of that is that a company that comes up with a cure for cancer (hypothetically, let's say all cancers) could charge a very large fee. Far larger than initial recurring treatment cost for managing the disease. In the short term they would make tremendous money (and thus they do have a strong incentive to develop the technology), but over the long term the companies behind recurring treatments are losing tremendous revenue.
To me it is just simple economics that companies want you to pay recurring treatment or maintenance costs because it ensures a stable source of revenue and since populations are rising, company growth is assured (or at least strongly encouraged--of course there are competitive factors which might lead to one company going out of business, but as a business category, the group of companies profitting from recurring costs will continue to profit and grow as long as no one finds a permanent solution for the problem).
Personally, I think all patents should go out the window. That brings us a little closer to developing the drugs just because they save lives and improve the quality of life. But even if all patents were out the window, you would still have a competitive service based free market, and I think it would be very much like the open source Linux market. There is still a tremendous amount of money to be made and many reasons to continue with development because the focus becomes quality of service. What I am saying is that in a patent-free world, the billions of dollars would still be there, and the innovation would still be there. But instead, companies would cooperate on innovation, and compete on service. There would still be more and more money because there are more and more people and they all want service.
Read the book Hot Property: The Stealing of Ideas in an Age of Globalization.
The Chinese on both the mainland and Taiwan have been stealing U.S. and European intellectual property for decades. They use any excuse they think will be accepted. It's possible that the excuse they are giving was market tested before they started to use it. The stealing is that sophisticated.
One way they steal is by buying the influence of corrupt U.S. politicians. Another way they steal is just by stealing.
Dean Baker, Bird Flu Fears: Is There a Better Way to Develop Drugs? (pdf)
There are probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of rather freedom-infringing laws on the books now which are essentially there ostensibly to protect US citizens from dangerous or harmfull things. For instance, its illegal to drive without a seat belt.
Yet the US Government continues to let its citizens die from lack of medical care for those who can't afford it. I guarantee you that lots of people are probably right now avoiding going to see a doctor because they don't have medical insurance and are terrified of incurring debts which will effectively ruin what remains of their lives. These people might have a condition which will eventually kill them but if they were to receive treatment now it would be trivial to cure.
I'm an engineer, a veteran, and my parents were not poor, but I've spent most of my adult life without medical coverage. The prices charged by the US medical industry are frankly appalling. For the price of one typical pill, I could feed my entire family, in style, for a week. A surgical procedure costs near that of a new car, and heaven forbid you are ever hospitilized for any period of time.
For a country so concerned about preventing cancer in its citizens, it seems that the government itself is severely infected with a cancerous growth called the health care industry which is sucking the life out of the country. Somebody needs to call the surgeon.
I wish Taiwan the best of luck. Its sad when the industry which is supposed to be saving lives is failing to perform due to corporate avarice and greed. How much is a human life worth? I've always been taught that it is priceless, and if petty negotiations over flu vaccine prices have been unsuccessful, then Taiwan should make the vaccine themselves if they have the technology to do so.
Clickety Click
Please stop spelling Brazil with "s" amidst english sentences.
This usage is only preached by a handful of fucktard brazilians over here.
Please do not help this utter retardness to spread any further.
Yes. St. Thomas Aquinas addresses this in ST II-II.66.7. "It is not theft, properly speaking, to take secretly and use another's property in a case of extreme need: because that which he takes for the support of his life becomes his own property by reason of that need." Although this would not be a "secret" taking (it's in the headlines!), the principle still replies. IF (and I stress the "if" because I have no idea what the price tag was) Roche is truly being unreasonable in their demands, and IF (ditto) the need to act now is truly extreme, then the Taiwanese government does have the right to act in violation of the patent.
There is precedence for this, even in America:
During the 1800's, it was OK to violate gun patents as long as they were used to make arms (Eli Whitney and his interchangable parts, and others).
-Thor Johnson
Developing new drugs is not cheap. It need not be, but the truth is, that when a drug makes it to the market, the company inventing it has spent millions on it. If they fuck up and there's some horrendous side-effects that were not uncovered in trials, one would expect them to be liable for it, and be able to sue them for millions as well. Most of this is uncovered in trials, but mistakes happen. A lot of the (basic) research is done with public funding, but in the end, it is the company that brings stuff to the market that bears the risk.
Or one might choose to make it all public sector, have all drugs cheap and available for everyone. But if things go wrong, expecting millions if some drug ruins the rest of your life is not really realistic.
I value human life above anything else, but we really can't get the best of both worlds.
If, and I mean if, this was actively killing I would totally support them for doing whatever they wanted. But this is just a case of we think you were going to charge us too much so as part of the negotiations they threatened the manufacturer that they would just make it themselves. The manufacturer called them on it and they weren't bluffing. My significant other is actually involved in infectious diseases and has talked about bird flu with some of the leading experts in the U.S. It is a real threat, however, it is *not* a threat now. It's just getting a lot of press coverage lately so people are freaking out about it. This has been around for years people. Saying we need to do this to save our population is just a ploy to avoid paying the high license fees. Nothing else.
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Taiwan just wants to get the stuff QUICKLY, so it's shortcutting the usual process.
As Taiwan is a signatory to TRIPS under the the WTO,h inese_taipei_e.htm )
( http://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/countries_e/c
there are serious economic consqeuenses for Taiwan if it doesn't eventually pay, (like trade embargos and higher tarriff by the patent holder's country) but I consider that extremely unlikely.
Sovereign governments always reserve the right to make use of patents that THEY have granted in THEIR jurisdiction ("Crown use"). Normally they do so by way of compulsory lisencing, on "just terms".
At least that's how it works in Australia.4 5/top.htm
Patents Act 1990 (Cth) s163 to s172
Part 2--Exploitation by the Crown
http://www.scaleplus.law.gov.au/html/pasteact/1/5
normal flu kills more people absolutely. but the mortality rate is about 4%.
bird flu has killed 70 people, yes. and only 140 people had it. mortality rate 50% and potentially even higher.
the only reason because you must not worry yet is that bird flu can only spread to people having very close contact with birds. yet. but if a person gets bird flu and normal flu at the same time the two viruses could combine their genomes and you get a flu which can be spreaded from human to human like the human flu but has a mortality rate of 50% like the bird flu.
now let's talk about some figures. in germany alone there are 6 millions of human flu patients every year (and not nearly everybody sees a doctor when he catches a flu). with the 50% and more mortality rate millions will die every year. kind of reincarnation of the black death.
do you still think there is nothing we need to be worrying about?
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
I follow up on a lot of the avian flu news, because it's A) no joke, and B) the real deal. Not sure what you mean by not affecting people, the official count is over 60 now and climbing. Dead as in croaked. Yes, an extremely low number compared to any number of causes, but the potential is for it to leapfrog to top of the queue in a very fast time frame. Very, very fast. This isn't quaint theory or anything.. it is being seriously under-reported and minimized in the main stream western press, even though it is making news daily, and those reports are scary enough. In particular, in indonesia, thailand, vietnam and mainland china there are apparent cases of human vectored, although not confirmed, it's suspicious as all get out. WHO has been railing against the dearth of information coming out of some of those areas. One village in china apparently has been disappeared off the list, like it never existed, after an outbreak in the bird population lead to a huge number of people getting "sick" although they never called it bird flu per se, they quarantined the area with the military, then the news reports from there....stopped. Just...freeking... stopped. No other official mention, although some unofficial from freelance bloggers trying to post from china. Sorry, I don't bookmark literally hundreds of links, just read them and file it away, so take it as just anecdotal, but I'd put the threat level at two notches higher than what the impression is they are trying to push.
You just don't *get* nations blatantly saying they are going to flat out ignore serious patents on important drugs like that for no good reason. Those scientists are righteously worried, enough so to convince governments, governments which are very reluctant to disturb the lucrative trading status quo. Even el shrubo had a "meeting" with some top pharmco leaders a few weeks ago. These are all clues.
With that said, it might get out of control at any time, no one knows,I don't, you don't, but the deal is..who's feeling lucky? Those name brand scientists aren't, else they would ignore it, it's not like there isn't something else to do to keep them occupied... The mortality rate is so high with people who have gotten it already (roughly 50% so far) that when/if it starts being readily human vectored, well...I'd say the potential damage to society, the global economy, etc would be unprecedented and incalcuable, larger than any previous global world war, even larger than the spanish flu. The regular flu nails billions of people a year, all this other is another obscure strain, just ten times deadlier (whatever, a large number) Perhaps the only historical equivalent for an analogy might be the black death, and that spread slowly, people just didn't travel as much as we do now.
I would fully expect vast regions of the planet, not just nations but regions, to de evolve into basically anarchy at some point if this thing gets out of control. No government could deal with it, even with big stocks of tamiflu. Just not happening. Most governments would collapse actually. Look at what one small earthquake or one small hurricane does to a government, now magnify that by one thousand, just run a conservative extrapolation with half your population sick or dying, and the other half scared silly.
It doesn't sound like calm, rational controlled civilization would last long in that situation, does it?
Will it get that bad, ever? Can't say yes or no, no one can, because no matter their credentials, the virus does not and will never give a rat's ass about human egos or patents or politics or money.
Seastead this.
Break the patent or have millions die.
t m
basically roche have a demand for a drug that they can't meet, initially thier stance was to refuse to licience the drug
they have changed thier position on friday
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4362864.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4366514.s
taiwan says its trying to get a licence but its main concern is public health.
"Once the virus gained the ability to pass easily between humans the results could be catastrophic.
Worldwide, experts predict anything between two million and 50 million deaths. "
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3422839.stm
The 1918 flu pandemic killed more people than WW1. This apparently was a bird flu strain. probably we are all descended from people who survived the 1918 flu (my great grandmother had it and lived I am hoping I got the right genes from her).
overturning patents in times of national emergency legal in most countrys. When this birdflu reaches america for example would george overturn the patent? Should he?
So given that taiwan needs the drug now. That your not going to find a goverment on this planet willing to give up some of it's stockpile of the drug (as no country has enough anyway).
Violate away it is justifiable in fact if you look at the link to the taiwan story its not fu roche its were making it now, we need it now, and we will deal with the paperwork later.
Is it just me or does it seem rather creepy that roche is going to make record profits on the back of millions of people who are probably going to die in the next few years.
How many countrys will behave as fairly to roche
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And Roches patents for the specific neuramidase inhibitor that is in "Tamiflu" were filed in 1999.
Drug companies typically apply for patents when a new chemical works in mice, rats, or rabbits. Clinical trials need to happen between then and when the FDA approves the drug's use.
That's the language all English speaking jurisdictions use. So why choose such an emotionally laden word like violation ??
Australia4 5/top.htm
PATENTS ACT 1990 (Cth)
Chapter 11--Infringement
http://www.scaleplus.law.gov.au/html/pasteact/1/5
USAs c_sup_01_35_10_III_20_28.html
CHAPTER 28--INFRINGEMENT OF PATENTS
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode35/u
UK
s60 - s71 Infringement
http://www.jenkins-ip.com/patlaw/index.htm
IANAL, but this sounds like an appropriate use of eminent domain.
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
The USA did this to Bayer in the early 20th century (WWI?) with aspirin. IIRC, Bayer held German and US patents on the drug. The US gummint decided that the drug was vital to national security and directed other folks to manufacture it. Bayer was never compensated for its loss, and came close to closing. Bayer never regained US market share, either.
By the time this is actively killing people, it'll be far too late.
Assume completely unrealistically that once we know that it's jumping between humans it takes a month to: acquire the raw materiel, convert a production line from manufacturing drug X to manufacturing Tamiflu, and ship it everywhere it needs to be. How many people will die in that month? How many others will be sick and infecting others? Tamiflu needs to be administered almost immediately to be effective. If you wait a couple of days, it's too late.
Y2K was hyped to be the big tech problem of our lifetimes, but ultimately wasn't because the entire industry spent 5 years and billions of dollars getting ready. I think we're all best served if the bird flu ends up that way too. And that's not gonna happen if we wait, and delay, and pretend that some miracle will save us. We need to stockpile the drugs we may need en masse before they're needed, not start producing them afterwards, as things go to hell around us.
>> By the time this is actively killing people, it'll be far too late.
But it's not. And there is no substantial documentation that it will be in the near future. And you don't have to ship everywhere just to the infection sites. And, all this it's going to kill because of a mutation is *pure* speculation right now. All your arguments are from the media which is hyping the outbreaks.
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From Brasil w/love.
Indeed there are. After the Anthrax scare the US needed more doses of Cipro, a Bayer product. Bayer's price was apparently too high so the senat decided that in this case copyright and patents do not apply. Bayer was forced to provide Cipro for a fraction of its price or lose the copyright and patent status.
At the same time the US strictly enforce(d) copyrights and patents for AIDS medication in Afrika.
Remember: Copyright and patents are only good when they work to the advantage of the US, in all other cases they are dispicable actions.
Personally I applaud this decision of the Taiwanese government.
How many want to join an American military invasion of Taiwan to force the Taiwanese
people at the point of a bayonet and nuclear weapons to accept death from a horrible disease. How many Americans want to have this disease themselves and not be able to afford to get the treatment for it. Roche has limited production of it and decided to ramp up the price instead. This is profiteering on human misery. And people such as these have the chutzpah to self appoint themselves to sit in judgement of others and spew filthy words out of their putrid mouths about those they consider 'pirates'. Who gave such as them the right to redefine the English language anyway. A pirate is a crewman or ships officer of a ship involved in armed robbery at sea. A 'pirate' is not a plagiarist' or a copier of formulas or an imitator of a business method. The shopping chain in Michigan 'Meijers" has been accused of this 'piracy' because it installed lazy susan shopping bag holders in its' checkout lanes similar to the ones in Wal-Mart stores. K-Mart is afraid to put aisle markers denoting contents of shopping aisles simply because Wal-Mart does so,may sue, and they are now allowed to so by foolish laws passed by bought and paid for legislators. I was taught in a debating class long ago that if the opposite side in a debate ever was not challenged for re-defining any terms of the debate, especially common English words, then the debate was essentially lost! This is precisely what the so called 'intellectual property' lobby has been allowed to do. Twenty years ago it was illegal to patent and 'idea'. Only hardware implementing that idea in a practical way could be patented, and prior work was searched out diligently. Similarly, Masters and Doctors theses and dissertations were also researched for prior work by any one anywhere in the world. A pirate is someone that better look like Captain Morgan or Jean LaFitte or some thug from off the Thai coast. He does NOT look like a Dilbert with a fat gut and a slow gait that would die if he had to walk a mile just outside of Tulsa Oklahoma in the summer. In short, IP protectors have become the largest protected class of organized racketeers and murderous thugs in the world and should all be prosecuted under the Sherman and Clayton Anti-Trust Acts. There activities are certainly in restraint of trade everywhere there poisonous presence has darkened anyone's door! Let the masters of this site publish this post if they dare, but they have'nt got the guts. They are too cowardly to face the IP crowd.
It's strange how we don't hear stories everyday about scientists worrying about what would happen if normal human flu mutated to have a 90% mortality rate, but is it any more or less likely?
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
US law explicitly grants broad exemptions to patent laws both to the government and companies contracted by the government when related to matters of national security or public health.
As a matter of fact, the governemt grants a patent in the interest of the public good and should it find that doing so has caused more harm than good, action can be taken to rescind it outright.
Make money on viagra, botox, and provide what is really needed in a hurry for an affordable price, if affordable==free give the patent away.
... actually shareholders are better off if half the earth is wiped out by some stuff that we have a cure for.... OK, then hold the patent and do not make the drug affordable.
... I go and find an other planet for myself with free beer, software and medicine ...
Oh-oh
This is really sad and i am sick of it
Sorry if this is a duplicate, tried to check.
Either there was the threat to revoke the patents per se, or they were ignored in order to produce war planes for the conflict.
The purpose there was more directly to take lives, in the case in point: here it is to save lives, hence, in my mind this has at least an equivalent moral weight of the incident I cite.
Ask yourself why graduate students and post-docs work so hard in school on their research. Or you could go ask them. Some (very) small percentage of them will go on to university positions, but the bulk of them will go work in private industry.
That is, people in university work to do very good research, and are willing to work for peanuts, because it translates into excellent job offers later, from, yes, drug companies, or even the opportunity to join a new start-up and retire rich on your stock options at age 35.
Which means the increased efficiency of the university is an illusion, caused by the fact that a huge chunk of their costs (the wages you have to pay brilliant and talented workers) are paid by private industry, later, after graduation.
They should not violate any patents. There are ways of dealing with things such as this without having to resort to piracy. Also, the ammount of people dying is not a good gauge by which to determine when a patent should be or should not be broken. Perhaps a better way to deal with the situation is by simply having certain things be off bounds for patents...such as I don't know... oh lets say anything that is to do with perpetuating human life... only allow patenting of things that improve the quality of life rather than the current version which allows patenting of life improving inventions as well as life perpetuating inventions.
Huh? [devShell.org]
Actually, my opinions were formed back when the first outbreak hit Hong Kong in 1997, and solidified when I read up on the 1918 flu.
You say here's no substantial documentation that H5N1 will be transmissible in the near future, but there's also no substantial documentation guaranteeing it won't. And this is the kind of thing we really can't afford to screw up. Remember SARS? How far did that get before we managed to squash it? For a while, it looked like Canada might not. And it's a lot less infectious than the flu.
Personally, my hunch is that we're still at least 2-3 years away from a human pandemic. But until we've got an effective vaccine, I'd rather see us overprepared, even at the expense of Roche's IP rights, than underprepared. I guess it's the girl scout in me.
Dumb and dumberer,
Canada, a social experiement in country building, has developed a society that produces doctors like Banting who came up with insulin, you may have heard of it.
While he was developing it, various people attempted to: bribe him to give it to them, steal it from him and, this might the most important part of the arguement, hire him so his work became the property of that corporation. After one such corp, who had tried to steal it and tried to publish and sell it, was exposed as frauds by being unable to produce the said product, he was able to win the subsequent court case.
Dr. Banting said one of the reasons he wanted it credited to himself, was to insure that it was released as public property, at no cost beyond manufacture.
Thats why your mom can afford it.
Here's another little bit to add to your quantification of health costs and the profits therefrom, surgery is public property. It is against the law, everywhere, even in the US, to try and keep the knowledge of surgical practice away from other surgeons, or to try and restrict the knowledge for profit. Against the Law.
Recently another Canadian doctor, wait this is just coinsidence, came up with a surgical way to cure diabetes, which means it would be free, except for the work to do it. Jeepers gettin' all GPL on us.
Here's another little bitty bit, there is a particular disease that prevents the production of a certain protein that essentially causes suffers, almost always clustered in families, to experience pain. All the time. All over the body. Weeping pain. Please kill me pain. Theres an enzyme that isn't produced naturaly, but that can be made and administered, and it stops 95% of the pain. The treatment costs $45,000.00 a year per person. And now remember, it clusters in families.
OK, now make your arguements about research being paid for.
BZZZZZTTTT!, too late! All the research was done at the Nation Institutes of Health, using public funds. NIH all the way. How American law was perverted and twisted to cause crimes like this (and Katrina) is beyond me, but it happens.
Ok last point. At the end of World War 2, corporations paid over 50% of federal revenue. now its about 8%. Universities used to be paid for research, education and publication. Now they beg corps for it.
Is the picture a little clearer now?
health care as a business is destinied to failure. the reason for this, is the american ideal that anything can be given the capitalism treatment and work. capitalism just doesn't work for healthcare because you have to accept making a loss.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Read my list of citations in the cousin post. This is not simply "the government" making decisions - it is specfically the NIH. Now, the NIH has made a great many mistakes, but if you think the NIH even *approaches* the corruption and incompetence of the drug industry, you're from Mars.
The industry - actually manufacturing drugs - stays in the private sector. No nationalization.
The only thing I'm proposing is that the government should stop distorting the market by allowing patents on drugs - at the same time, government financing of R&D should, as a policy question, be expanded to take up the slack. There's no nationalization here.
You say I'd be hard pressed to find an economist who'd regard this as a capitalist solution - maybe that's true but that doesn't answer the underlying question: *is it* a capitalist solution, or not?
I stand by my statement that public financing of R&D is less of a market distortion than are patents, and therefore is more capitalist. Why and in what way am I wrong?
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Why would I want my pharm co. to give away billions of potential profits to a bunch of third world losers? We here in the #1 have free corp supplied meds and I don't give a shit about those that can't bang the rocks together. If they had propper lineage they wouldn't be holding their dirty fingers out for a filthy copper.
Fuck then all, Corp america rules, take over the world Bush, rummy, rove PNAC, we will kill you all and take your shit...
Gotta check my stocks...
perhaps because you are the richest country on the fucking earth?
1. United States 11,667,515
2. Japan 4,623,398
France (5th) and China (7th) have less than a 5th of the GDP of the USA
And that data is from the world bank (2004):
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:ms9Z6taeRcMJ:ww w.worldbank.org/data/databytopic/GDP.pdf+gdp&hl=en &client=firefox-a
Just because the US model produces the most results, does not mean it is the most efficient. The pharmaceutical companies spend more on lobbying than any other industry... do you think there is a reason for that?
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything" -- Josef Stalin
Nobody with more than a single braincell or less than a billion dollars considers the convention of property to be sacrosanct. Where, as lawmakers, do we draw the line? We need some kind of ez way to overrule property owners. This shouldn't be such a shocking event. It should happen more often. Our culture would be better off if it happened more often. Yes, I know how laws get made.
Brazil and Uganda both had broke or were planning to break patents on HIV drugs because they believed the prices where too high. Since the companies who patents were in trouble were US companies the US government filed with the WTO to have sanctions against both countries. yadda yadda ...
But I wonder what will happen since it is Taiwan. They are America's sweetheart against China. Plus Roche is not a US company. Will the US government pressure Roche not to file against Taiwan the way the US filed against Brazil and Uganda. Will the US use their power in the WTO to stop any motions.
The question is will the US government be hypocritical and protect their baby against the evils the WTO does?
Euphemism, what is that a euphemism for something.
Ill bet a lot of these countries are dumping a lot of money into researching this. Sure, economic sanctions might teach them a little lesson. But, do you want to be the one to say, "Sure we can save your lives, but whats in it for me?". And remember governments are still supposed answer to a lot of people, and if the people say, "I dont give a damn about a patent, I dont want to die!", then thats what theyre supposed to do.
Spend money to make more money. Without marketing, there is no money earned.
"The majority of the expenses associated with new drug discovery are actually made in the public sector - by Universities and so forth."
0 05-03-17.1145.pdf
Private R&D spending on pharmaceuticals exceeds public R&D spending. This is actually true for R&D in general ($132 billion federal vs. $190 billion industry), and it's true for pharmaceuticals ($30 billion federal vs. $49 billion industry). For the first 3 figures, see here:
http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/rd06main.htm [chapters 2 & 4]
For the last figure, see here:
http://www.phrma.org/publications/publications//2
The last is an industry organization, but r&d spending is part of companies' public SEC filings and the figures are in line with the aggregate numbers.
It's a fallacy that public and private pharmaceutical r&d are substitutes. Public r&d tends to focus on basic science while private r&d focuses on specific drug development and testing. Here it is from the horse's mouth:
http://ott.od.nih.gov/Reports/211856ottrept.pdf
The public sector would be just as good at developing drugs as it would be at making cars and televisions (see Union, Soviet).
"these additional resources are a *fraction* of the total increase in drug prices that result from the patents they are awarded"
If patents over-compensate drug companies, then we'd see a lot more entry into the (apparently very lucrative) drug business by new firms until these extra-ordinary returns are competed away. Even with patent protection, lucrative business models attract entry by competitors until excess profits are competed away.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
A couple of years ago when anthrax was floating in the US mail system, Canada contracted with Apotex (a local generic manufacturer) for production of ciprofloxacin rather than purchase it from the patent holder Bayer. If I remember correctly, they did not even hold more than cursory discussions with the patent holder. Contrast this with third-world countries (incl. Brazil) who produce AIDS drugs in breach of patents held by drug companies. They have a real and present public health problem and many continue to argue that they should not be able to breach these patents. Let your AIDs infected die if they don't have the money, but even threaten a first-world country and they are running all over the patents. The sad problem is that there is evidence that Tamiflu does not protect against H5N1, which is the bird flu strain that Taiwan is most worried about.
...There is a clause in the relevant international patent agreement that says a country can break patents if it will prevent or reduce a humanitarian crisis. From my vague memory, the pharma's were non-too happy about Brazil(?) breaking such patents to combat their countries AIDS epidemic. Similarly in South Africa.
patent laws suck, and are great at the same time. Any regular /. reader should know this by now. They are great for inventors who come up with new and exciting products that they want to get put in the market. Where would we be without the Wright Brothers or Edison? At the same time they are very often abused by both small time inventors and big corperations alike. Weve all seen cases where an extremely ambiguos patent is used by some greedy little bastard to try and get all the money he can for something he realy didn't invent, visa vis some guy suing over XML. At the same time its situations like the one mentioned in this article that shows how larger corperations can abuse patents. What the solution is Im not sure, but it is obvious that the current system isn't working very well.
Drug companies like to whine about how much money they spend in R&D for a given drug - but they don't spend that much money. The money goes into marketing, and into profit. Developing a fancy shmancy drug might involve a 6 million dollar large scale surveys, it might involve 20 senior scientists and 40 assistants for 2 years. If the senior scientists make 200,000 a year and the assistants make 100,000 lets say R&D salary is 16 million then. Perhaps there are 20 million in facilities costs, property taxes on those facilities, which is a one time cost for the company as they can reuse their facilities. being enormously generous, and factoring in lots of mishaps, lets say there is a 10 million dollar budget for materials - including buying time on electron scanners, glassware, test monkeys, cable TV for the break room, etc, This still all adds up for a startup R&D cost of 52 million dollars, and a running cost of 32 million dollars. Ive probably overlooked lots of costs, and been naive about others, lets jump the R&D cost up to 100 million dollars just to be safe - this still doesn't require 40 years of price gouging patent control to be profitable. Rather, companies skimp on the R&D and spend on the advertising. Their ultimate goal is to sell drugs - whether those drugs are better or worse than the competition is 80% in the mind of the consumer. If a new class of drugs comes out, to compete, they can just buy a patent from a smaller group. The money goes into competitive advertising, the R&D that sells drugs is in the minds of the consumer. GJ Thailand!
We are now. I know many older Americans skipping or cutting down on their meds because they can't afford them. People without insurance can't afford brand name drugs as it is. The reality is people are dying now because they can't afford insurance and proper health care, including some of those 500 dollar prescriptions.
Perhaps you meant "many, many drugs for people who have insurance will never get developed." Which might be true. All in all, I think having fewer drugs more widely affordable would be a step ahead of where we are today.
If those windfall profits were actually going into R&D, I'd have more sympathy for the big name drug makers. But the bulk of those profits are going toward enhancing shareholder value, making rich people even more rich. Otherwise how can drug makers ship drugs to Canada who then sells them back to our own citizens for less than we can buy them here? Canadian pharmacies are still making a profit. The only way that math works is the certain knowledge that we're getting boned on drug prices.
What you say is true from one narrow perspective but not on the macro scale. Drugs are likely only to be the first patents ignored on the world market. Technology might be next. Perhaps you've noticed the really hot tech doesn't premiere here anymore. The new buzz phrase is "No word on when it will be available in the US." Maybe never.
As our patent system becomes ever more litigious and retarded more countries are going to be tempted to bust technology patents for use in their own country.
And, of course, we can't take on patent reform without first making sure all those people in bankruptcy because of catastrophic medical expenses go to credit counseling and pay back their credit card bills and that we shield those poor gun makers from legal liability. Those are obviously hugely important compared to poor people dying, and old people we're almost dead anyway, but I'm sure our Republican servants of the people will get to that patent thing just any day now.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Well. first of all lets not forget why patents were actually invented. whole point of making patents was that inventors HAVE TO describe theyr invention and make it avaible for ppl. in return they had rights to get money from companies which used they invention.
;))
Whole patent idea was invented to HELP humanity as whole, and to rapid inventions. not to protect medical or software corporations.
so in my opinion Taiwan made best possible move.
(my first post, and english is my thrid langue so please be good to me
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree. I've been both a grad student and post-doc myself, and also a faculty member recruiting and supervising them, and my experience says you're flat wrong. Of course, everyone in science will tell you they do it for pure love of discovery. Yup, just like all politicians tell you they run for office just for the pure love of serving their country.
But try actually taking away any hope of decent money (and "decent" for bright and capable people does not mean "average"). Try telling graduate students living in roach motels scraping by on Top Ramen that they will always make $19,000 a year and never be able to buy a nice house and a second car, raise a family, afford top-quality health care, pay back the student loans and take out a new set for the kids' college eduaction -- and you will see the supply dry up in no time flat.
Of course, I applaud your present pure motives. Indeed, the American science research industry counts on them. Do you have any idea what it would cost to replace you with a cynical 32-year-old with equivalently high and marketable skills, but with a family to support and a retirement for which to plan?
We have seen violation of patent rights on the part of almost every developing nation throughrout the history of the modern world, indeed ever since the patent system came into existence the patent system has been systematically voilated.
European patents were voilated in the USA, why else would the united states have created their own patent system. Theoretically it would make much more sense to have a single worldwide patent system which would not stop at national borders.
The US patent system was set up so that citizens of the united states to travel to europe, find out their manufacturing techniques and then repatent them in America. If the European manufacturer exported their goods to the united states they could be sued for breach of the american patent on their own designs.
The system has got to such a point that inventors worldwide subscibe to the US patent system in order to stop the manufactures in the US from stealing their ideas.
Now in the case of other developing economies they have done the same thing. Develop new factories using state of the art technology so that they can take advantage of the low labour costs and the economies of scale involved in modern manufacturing.
The same can be said of drug patents, if it cost too much to support corporate fatcats in another nation, simply refuse and set up your own manufacturing.
If they will not release the recipes and synthesis techniques it is an easy matter of separating, identifying, manufacturing and blending the compenents involved.
And all in a much better cause than simply increase profits.
Charles Schumer, the senior senator from NY, has been big on this in the last month (and has been big on affordable drug policies for years...) First he said it was inexusable that Roche was putting their profits ahead of widespread safety, and last week said that Roche was being unreasonable in refusing to take steps to make the drug more widely available (not stepping up production, not meeting with other potential producers). Schumer threatened Congressional action to ignore the patent if there was no action from Roche in 30 days. Now it sounds like Roche relented, at least a little in the US market, and has agreed to step up production and at least talk with other potential producers about licensing.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
This is kind of bullshit, so there isn't a pandemic. There isn't really even a substantial cause for concern other than it has been a pretty long time since the last one and the people that are dealing with these birds are in fact dropping dead. Basically, ever flu season there is something similar, some people die from it, the media is hyping this up because every hundred years plus or minus a few there is a bad one and we're due. So the trend I'd see is that companies shouldn't invest in drugs to fight flu because as soon as it looks like there might be a flu we're just going to appropriate the rights to manufacture the shit in the first place (except for the few richer in IP nations) which will just wait it out and do nothing rather than steal from the companies doing this research. But that's the trend anyways, why do the hard work and cure disese when you can fabricate problems (like your penis being too small) and sell drugs for that stuff instead?
This is a particularly difficult problem. People shouldn't die because of this, people shouldn't be robbed either. if tamiflu works, they deserve some profit for that. Subsequently, the rest of the insurance and medical industry is so cluster fucked up that this seems like a minimal infraction..
Basically, before you can even begin to have a rational discussion about this the medical industry has to be repaired; there is so much fraud and corruption that it's sick. Part of that involves retooling the tax system (why not just flat across the board, both for business and individual, cut out the billions of dollars spent processing taxes) and remove all of the hiding places for crafty companies to put their money. The inter-relations between social security and medicare and medicade are so complex and so much money are being pumped into the system that it's a profit center for companies and the problem is now that they are exceeding what can be put in from taxes (too much double digit growth because it's all the tax payer's dime) You almost have to just scuttle the whole thing and start fresh with an even keel.
Yea "market value", right, can you make this any grayer, these values are typically manipulated downward in these issues. The "eminent domain" thread keeps popping out, I know US law addresses this issue, with an ugly draconian efficiency with the recent decisions. However since Roche is a Swiss company that may not mean not very much in Taiwan. I am not sure how the Swiss, Taiwan or probably most important international laws land on "eminent domain" issues. Of course since international law is set by appointed peons of an few faux elected pigeons and an corporate oliarchy I suspect the usual outcomes. I do feel that intellectual property deserves maybe different not necessarily any more consideration than real property. Anyway, that nations are dealing with these issues in such a form may be sign that the unregulated "greed is good" form of capitalism rampant in the world may have began hitting the limits of acceptance. The drug companies are some of the worst examples of this type of world view. And I have heard about enough malarkey about the "investments" made by corporate entities. Since these are 100+ tax deductible, the end cost to the corporate entity is less than zero. What really peeves me is the marketing costs are too, and more money falls down this black hole that anything with a real ROI. Light marketing industry regulation, and slippery kickback deals cost both the tax payer and the shareholders dearly. Plus I am sure R&D expenses are inflated as much as possible like all others. The end effect is most corporate entities actually end up being subsidized by taxpayers. Get corporate off welfare and the poor won't need it! Another issue, public university's do most of the high risk, low return baseline research anyway, sure they get some returns off the programs that should reduce burden on the taxpayer, I said SOME and SHOULD. I'm just happy its a European corporate thief this time. wilec
In the US, they once were. This is described in the movie "The Corporation", a movie I highly recommend seeing regardless of your take on the power of corporations (including corporate accountability) or patent law. I've seen it a number of times and I'm impressed with its informativeness, candor, and ability to explain the overarching theme of the movie—if corporations have so many of the rights (and so few of the responsibilities) of people, what kind of people are they?.
One of the interviewees in the movie, philosopher Mark Kingwell, describes that fire fighting services were privatized in the US. I'll do what I can to summarize what he said: Homeowners would purchase an agreement with a firefighting organization and their house would bear a placard alerting anyone what firefighting organization would put out a fire on that house. This meant that if one's house was on fire and a competing firefighting truck saw the house in flames, it would roll on by. After all, you had a contract with a different firefighter. Eventually, people figured out that this was a silly arrangement and we collectively paid to fight fires in the country regardless of where they were; we nationalized firefighting.
I'd add that some point out that it is only a matter of time until more Americans reach a comparable epiphany regarding health care service; reaching the same conclusion that other countries have reached—we should all pay for these services and deliver health care to all citizens, focusing on how to keep people well throughout their lives so that we don't spend so much on expensive things like emergency care.
Digital Citizen
I was told that Barry Marshall and Robin Warren's discovery that peptic ulcers could be frequently cured by antibiotics instead of maintained with proton-pump inhibitors was suppressed until some major patent or another ran out and the discovery was no longer a threat to someone's monopoly.
But that's a rather weak case, so never mind.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
If you're standing way over on the north side of the beach it could be said, irrefutably, that you are on the north side. So far over you couldn't hit the south side of the beach with a laser-guided missile. Why do you need to know where the line in the sand is between north beach and south beach.
You don't have border skirmishes 600 miles inside enemy teritory.
Save that kind of question for when it's a matter of a meer 500 or so deaths, when there are 50,000+ lives at stake it's beyond discussion.
Glad to see a goverment that values people over $$$s.
Serves him right! I bet he forgot his tinfoil hat again.
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
"Just compensation" does not mean simply paying for expenses. By that argument, if the government confiscated your house to build a freeway, they'd only have to pay you either your exact purchase price (if you bought it existing), or the amount it cost you to build it (if you're the one that built it). However, they cannot do this: They have to pay you the going market rate for the property, which in many cases involves you profiting, if the value has gone up since you bought it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The drug would be affordable for Taiwan to treat the DISEASE, but that isn't what they are looking for.
So far this "epidemic" has claimed 60 lives. While it is tragic for those families, it isn't a return of the plague.
The disease is not currently jumping from bird -> human except in cases of HEAVY contact, and there is no human -> human jumping.
In previous "bird flu" epidemics, illegal versions of the drugs were used to treat birds by poor farmers rightfully fearing losing their livelihood. As a result, the remaining disease was resistant to the treatment, and previous treatments were no longer valid. There is an article in this month's Fortune on the issue...
Basically, if you keep the price high, people (or their governments) will pay for it to save lives, but not over use it to the point of treating birds...
It's not simple, and that's without debating the merits of our current private sector drug industry...
Alex
You raise an important point, and I do realize the facts you point out strike a lot of young scientists rather like a smack across the face with a dead fish, but I rather think your facts support my case.
You see, first of all the best students and post-docs don't have to get jobs in sales and marketing. They do get jobs as PIs in top private labs. If you're in the field, you know that already. (Although if you want to point out that "top" may often not mean 100% "top scientifically" and contain a generous portion of "schmoozed with the right people at conferences," "did the flashiest research," "had the best-connected adviser" or just plain "lucky" I won't disagree.) So the prospect of a great job in private industry is motivating work in the university lab before graduation.
And, furthermore, while being a pharma salesman may not be the starry-eyed young scientist's initial dream, 100 G's a year can really soften the blow. People get used to trading notions of a Nobel Prize for living in a nice house on a good street and being able to afford a vacation on Maui every year. The 30s are all about compromising with your young dreams anyway. So I think the fact that people are willing to take those jobs, and they pull people through graduate school, just underlines the fundamental capitalist fact that very little motivates the individual better than good wages.
These sorts of confiscations must be understood to be only for extraordinary and rare circumstances, if they are not to negatively impact the market. If people thought there was a good chance of having their property confiscated, they would be reluctant to invest much effort in developing it. Similarly, drug companies will be reluctant to develop new cures if they are routinely confiscated without payment.
If it happens once in a great while in extraordinary cases, that's one thing, but it would be very bad if it became expected behavior.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You are suggesting that it would be better to have fewer drugs, but have them cheaper. I would suggest you think about the patent system, we DO get the best of both worlds now.
By the time the regulatory hoops are jumped through and a drug is approved, there is usually less than 10 years left on the patent.
This means that right now, ALL DRUGS ON THE MARKET BEFORE 1995 have dirt-cheap generic versions of them.
The market system we have does limit the NEWEST drugs to those that can afford them or afford good insurance... this is true.
But the rapid development of new drugs continues.
By 2015, all these "overpriced miracle drugs" will be available cheaply...
I'm okay with the newest treatments being scarce, if that maximizes drug development, because within a few years, those same drugs are available cheaply.
You need to take a longer term view.
Alex
YOu make the mistake of thinking politicians are not only rational actors, but seek the best solutions. They are rational actors, but they seek to maximize votes. Right now people are fearful of bird flu, so they are threatening to withhold their votes from administartions that do nothing. Elected politicians in Taiwan is responding to this threat with action (even if the long term costs are signficant). As a corrilary, while it probably would have been dumb (and perhaps illegal) send in the Army and dump a billion pounds of sand in the levys as the hurrican hit, had that been the first action Bush had undertaken once the clouds broke, he probably would have considerably higher job approval ratings right now.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
You mention the need for patents in order to protect "the future"
I think you are underestimating the possibilities of this bird flu.
it could wipe out world stock markets for a decade.
Its in your interests for all governments to catch this one early and effectively, whatever methods they use.
If it appears, then there will be desperate attempts to stop it, for example you can be sure that any country that has a pandemic and is isolateable will have anything that moves over its boarders terminated with extreme predudice. Maybe the rest of the world might agree to wipe the place out with nuclear weapons.
Unfortunately if a human transmissible version of this virus appears then even this will be pointless. Only half a million Americans died in the 1918 pandemic and 50 million worldwide. There was no air travel at the time so it wouldnt be suprising if these figures were a hundred times higher for a pandemic today, it would be everywhere within a week.
The USA is not exactly shining with glory over its disaster preparedness planning since the debacle in New Orleans. I hope that the federal government that many seem to so despise is prepared to manufacture a flu vaccine for you personally. In the UK the government has just announced contracts to make 120 million doses of vaccine, of course they wont be able to make them all for the first wave, but it should be three months before the second wave and that should allow time for at least the surviving medical staff, army and police to get a dose.
Mind you life is full of risks, the media delights in scaring us with the latest one.
Some we live with and over time grow complacent about. Californians have the next big earthquake, New Orleans have had their Leves breached and the Kashmiris have their earthquake. It is instructive to compare the effect of catastrophe on different places, a thousand deaths in Louisiana, 45 thousand in Pakistan and few if any from the little quakes in California.
The thing that appears to have made a difference in these cases is the degree of preparedness. Californian building codes verses Pakistani ones (admittedly they couldnt afford much better ones) and New Orleans mostly got out in time. Also the tsunami which would have had much less effect if people had an hours warning to walk inland.
A bird flu inflenza is a very real threat, by this time next year a third of us could be dead.
Pandemic illnesses and in fact most viral illnesses have been found to have come from cross species transmission, their danger comming from the fact that they have slowly mutated in an animal species into something that the human immune system knows nothing of. The virus itself may once have transfered from human to bird. So when it crosses the interspecies boundary we have no remembered defence, this is the case with bird flu. Up to a third of the individuals who have caught it directly from birds have died. All that remains is for an individual to be carrying a normal easily transmitted human virus to catch bird flu and for the two kinds of virus to exchange components and you get a human influenza that carries the nasty behaviour of bird flu. try a google search for antigenic drift or just have a look at CDC.
I dont know what the risk is of the two virii cross pollinating in this way - but the microbiologists seem worried that this will happen. You would have to find out what the probability of this is before you can say whether a pandemic is imminent and I dont think anybody has reliable figures on this. Governments seem to think it inevitable.
However consider the known risk factors that the media get excited over that we all live with eg Nuclear power station melt down, heart disease, cancer, food dyes, various slightly suspect chemicals in products we come in daily contact with (that give a rat cancer if you feed the rat its own body weight of the chemical), pesticides, being run over by a bus, being struck by lightning etc
- none of these are likely to destroy our
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
"Actually, the vast majority of research - particularly in potential drug therapies - is done with public (NIH grants) and not-for-profit funds (think March of Dimes, Juvenile Diabetes, Jerry Lewis, William Gates Foundation, etc.) by universities and such."
_ files/Iglehart_Slides.pdf. 03.2005.1142.cfmh ot_topics/detail.asp?id=22
Who starts these urban legends?
http://www.kaisernetwork.org/health_cast/uploaded
http://www.phrma.org/publications/publications/17
http://www.bain.com/bainweb/Consulting_Expertise/
Vote for Pedro
When you are six feet under. That would be a really neat trick. Sorry. I just had to say that.
FYI, patents are a personal monopoly granted by the government, not a natural law property right. They are not anything like regular property that has natural physical limits in supply and demand and no expiration date. Properties are about controlling limited resources, not about controlling people. They are not a valad property right any more than slaves on the plantation in 1850, and considering all the people they kill by locking out cures for diseases, and life saving innovations that were likely to happen in natural progression of things anyhow, they are agruably worse.
The most crazy part is that people say they promote R&D when patents really kill it. Patnets skew R&D so that researchers don't collaberate, and so that cheap inexpensive pratical cures to diseases are shuned and even attacked.
Seriously, if you steal my car I think I would be very violated and deprived of my transportation, but if you make a copy of it - hell have 10! The notion that copying and immitation is a form of stealing is bullshit morality, and the people who impose it are really the ones who are immoral.
When Daguerre attempted to patent Photography in 1839 the French government immediately saw that the invention was too important and refused the patent and released the invention into the public domain within the week. It also compensated him through a pension for life.
A method where inventions that are so important such as a drug that could prevent a pandemic could be released immediately while compensating the company or researcher involved with the invention may be an alternative to corporate greed.
Somehow the inventor or in this case the Corporation should be compensated for the "invention" of the drug, but should not be allowed to hide behind the greed thereby assured through the use of licencing the patent. Taiwan should produce it, and offer to pay Roche what it considers an adequate compensation. If Roche does not like it, then perhaps the patent system is not where they need to publish data, and if they were to sue Taiwan for any other compensation, Taiwanese courts I am sure would throw out the case.
Reality is all that stuff that doesn't care if you believe in it or not.--Solomon Short
Roche has already agreed to let others manufacture it as a generic. See this artical from the Seattle Times
One of the interviewees in the movie, philosopher Mark Kingwell, describes that fire fighting services were privatized in the US.
I could've sworn that was Noam Chomsky.
During World War I the US government did the same thing with Aspirin, for which the patent was held by Bayer (a German company)
Since the PRC settled into power, high Chinese officials have been on record as stating that they do not fear immigration, nuclear war, or pandemics because China simply has too many people. China and India are in unique positions in the world: while other countries worry about loss of population, China and India worries about an excess of population.
China did not follow World Health Organization guidelines on the use of the antiviral adamantine. Instead China produced the drug in mass quantities and distributed it to Chinese poultry growers to feed flocks threatened by avian flu. Consequently new strains of avian flu have arisen in China that are resistant to adamantine and that drug is no longer effective in protecting humans from avian flu.
China would benefit if 10%, 20% or even 50% of the world's human population died tomorrow, because afterwards China would still have too many people! For every other country a pandemic would be a disaster, but for China it would be a relief.
Expect no assistance from China in handling pandemics; their highest government officials want pandemics and include them in their arsenal of weapons.
"Maybe once a virus or disease is labeled an epidemic then funding should come directly from the government for said development?" ~Cylix
Oh no! He's on to us!
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
During the 'anthrax scare' our health minister bought a load of generic anthrax vaccine, even though it was patented by another company. The news was talking earlier in the week about the possibility of doing it again in this case. They mentioned an Indian company that's already manufacturing a generic version of Tamiflu. But they also said that Roche is loooking at licensing their drug to generic drug manufacturers so they can still make a buck (or 50 million) even though they can't manufacture enough of the drug.
I'd say in regards to business ethics violating the patent is definately acceptable.
The greater good of mankind always comes before profit.
Merck violated this by not recalling Vioxx earlier. They went for profit over safety. A clear violation of this protocol.
A company is allowed to make a profit, provided they do not cause harm as a result of these profit gaining activities. For example, it's acceptable to charge for medication at cost during time of an epidemic. Since someone has to make it, and ingredients need to be purchased. To charge 500% in times of need... violates that policy.
If your product/service is made in a way that the factory emits harmful substances into the evironment and causes harm to neighboring communities... you broke that ethical boundry.
If your service creates harm to business (price fixing, paying suppliers not to sell to a competitor etc.) or individuals (see above)... you broke that ethical boundry.
A government has an obligation to above all, protect it's people. If a government doesn't do that job. It has failed.
That said, I'm 100% behind Taiwan in that decision. I hope the US follows it. Given those circumstances, there's no legitimate argument not to in regards to ethics or morals.
I never said he invented them, I'm not sure where you got that strawman from. Faraday is well known for analyzing/discovering the properties of capacitors with which our basic knowledge is built upon today. Maxwell's work came after Faraday's (Faraday was already well known when Maxwell as still a student), it was based on his in part. Gauss and Faraday also did a lot of their work indepently, as they did their research around the same time on different, but related things. So your history is off, nice try at being a smart ass though.
:-p I only mention this so we can spare eachother the further nitpicking about who influenced Gauss, Faraday, and their students.
Heh. Now we have something to talk about. I'm not invested in your and Sam's debate, I was only curious about the question that you didn't answer (and I stated as such). You're right of course, you didn't say he invented them... I guess I was just hotheadedly quipping.
Here's my justification for my earlier parenthetical:
One could consider Maxwell as Faraday's student, that's not disputed (or shouldn't be!). And as often the case, the student came to surpass the master (as is the nature of science). Again, Faraday's work lead to understandings/insights in capacitance (or how capacitors worked). Even more directly, you can easily see that Faraday's work on inductance lead to: Electric motors, transformers, etc (which may even be more imporant? Your call though -- batteries more important than motors/dynamos?). I'm not disputing any of his great insight in visually comprehending (what we would later call) the electric field or his countless and often brilliant experiments that evolved from this. It's really not being a smart ass to say that Faraday didn't "invent capacitors" (I've already admitted confusion as to your exact meaning from "Let's thank Michael Farady, too, who discovered the properties of the capacitor," because he didn't really). I mentioned Maxwell because he lended the rigour to Faraday's work (and later the crucial pieces for special relativity) and Gauss because Faraday wasn't the greatest mathematician (while both Maxwell and Gauss were, and as such were better at describing the properties of a capacitance). Anyhow, you've obviously studied physics, too or we wouldn't be talking about this (yay physics!). I'm not throwing down the gauntlet or something
I've often thought about getting a degree in physics so I could teach it. It's all just so fascinating!
Cheers!
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
This is not an abstract statistic. Real people, your friends and family included, will get the virus, have fever, cough blood and die within a few days... simple as that. I've heard that 98 of 100 will survive the bird flu pandemic... seemingly not bad, but do you realize what that means? Think of a hundred people you know about (I'm sure you can) now think of the bird flu randomly killing any two of those people... are you ok with that? This is the future we are going to be dealing with all too soon.
This is why any discussion as to what incentive there is for drug companies to develop vaccination to the bird flu seems so ridiculous to me. First off, bird flu (when it happens) will only last for one season... no matter how you slice it, there could never be any real market (as there is with AIDS) to continuously fend off bird flu long-term... it is an immediate, one-time emergency. Second, with the first point in mind, there doesn't always have to be a financial benefit to making a life-saving vaccine. There are plenty of ways of making money on other drugs that do provide continuous streams of revenue (like heartburn pills, anti-depressants... almost anything, really). Here's an idea for the drug companies: relinquish your patent, work with the government willingly to save lives from this global pandemic. Let taxes offset the cost of production and offset the rest of the production by jacking up the prices on your other, non-critical drugs. I'm not sure about everyone else, but I'd gladly welcome a kick in my taxes and pay an extra $10 per box of Prilosec (or whatnot) to know that my loved ones and I will be safe from this coming pandemic.
Food for thought: The children and the old people will be the safest from the bird flu because of their weaker immune systems. It will be people in the prime of their lives who will die the most quickly and violently because the bird flu attacks the lungs and a healthy immune system, in trying to kill the bird flu, will also attack your lungs! This is a gruesome prospect, the likes of which the most of us have (hopefully) never before had to deal with.
I sincerely believe that we as a people can prepare for and prevent this, but first we have to make the decision to do so.
kill the birds..
all of them..
no pandemic..
no problem..
i hate microsoft.
I'm sorry, but "... generally protecting the population from itself."???
You've got to be kidding. Which government is supposed to protect the population from itself? I'd really like to know, so I can be sure not to emigrate there.
Oh, I know such has become U.S. policy as of the last eighty years or so, but that's only because of politicians and fearmongering (can you say "War On Drugs"?) -- certainly not what the Framers intended!
If I was a Pharma firm I would be seriously looking into some sort of DRM protection mechanism for their drugs. I wonder if it could be possible to build drugs in a way that is confusing or impossible to disassemble or would require some sort of a 'key' - a binary drug, where only the first portion of the drug is patented (opened for viewing under the patent law,) and the second form of drug is guarded as a secret. For this drug to be effective, the first portion that is patented must be taken with the second portion that is secret.
Obviously a buyer can try and figure out the 'secret' of the second portion of the drug, here the pharma firm needs to be inventive and somehow work out a chemical/biological protection scheme.
Good luck to them.
You can't handle the truth.
So, Slashdot -- who's right?
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
"Tiawan can afford the drug. The amount of money in the corruption-fueled grey economy of corrupt officials is more than enough to buy the drugs....It's not about lack of money in Tiawan, but about priorities of spending"
I just wish they would fix those priorities. Someday, I hope to hear the following exchange in a session of parliament in Taiwan:
"All right guys, we've got a serious crisis on our hands; we need to reset our budget priorities. Here's our priority list from last year:
1. Defense.
2. Corruption.
3. Social Security
4. Education
Now, the drug company is asking for a lot of money for this bird flu drug, and the money is going to need to come from somewhere. Personally, I'd like to see us cut back on our current Item Number Two a bit. Who's with me?"
[An awkward silence.]
"Come on guys, I know we all really like buying big houses for our friends and such, but could we maybe just, you know, ease up on it for a year or two? We'll just get this bird flu thing knocked out of the way and we can get back to business before you even notice anything's happened."
A murmur runs through the room. It grows louder. Heads shake, people are seen scribbling things on notepads. Finally, Li Fau-Ching, the oldest, most respected MP, stands up, and says, "I'd like to propose a 30% cut in corruption!" Gasps are heard on the floor. Another MP stands up, and says "I'll second". Another stands, and another. Somewhere, an upbeat pop tune starts playing. The bird flu drug advocate, a dashing young freshman with a doctor girlfriend, smiles. Maybe Taiwan can change, he thinks. Maybe.
one hundred twenty
is just enough characters
to write a haiku
I just want to be clear on this: are pharmaceutical megacorps good or bad ? The way I see it, they are effectively imposing a ransom on health. Why are drugs so expensive ? Because they are in demand. It's basically like saying "If you don't pay, you're gonna die. So exactly how much money have you got ?" And they jack up the price accordingly.
Health care and medicinal research should either be government-communized so everyone can have access to proper treatment and medicine, or shot to hell so as to skim off the weak and purify the breed through natural selection.
Now I still hate humans and wish most of them would die a horrible death for my primal amusement, but I think I'd rather see fully subsidized health care for all, and toss these glorified drug dealers back into the ranks of the working poor.
The less rich people there are, the less poor people there are. Now I'm not saying to swing into full-on communism, but maybe as a modern society we could find an efficient mix of various ideologies in order to benefit humankind as a whole. Capitalism at the expense of lives only breeds more hatred.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Taiwan does have the money, but the BBC article failed to point out that Roche has been insufficient in supplying Tamiflu to meet worldwide demand. Taiwanese government plans to address the supply issue by manufacturing the drug in solutions. This has at least two benefits:
Beyond meeting the supply, Taiwanese government does plan to compensate Roche for what Tamiflu is worth. As I understand it, a negotiation is still going on, but it is true that Taiwanese government has went ahead to produce the drug. BBC does not make it clear either.
I once had a signature.
This cannot be allowed to happen! Millions of people must die so that Roche can make money off it's IP! Why would anybody spend money on flu vaccines if they weren't afraid of dying if they didn't! This will be a disaster for capitalism! Oh hell, the Communists have already won!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
They all point to the fact that the pharmaceuticals are spending more on research in recent history than the NIH, but it doesn't specify which diseases or disabilities they're spending that money on.
Compare the number of new allergy, erectile dysfunction, and anti-inflammatory drugs that have come out from those companies in that time period (i.e. treating chronic symptoms) to, say, the number of new antibiotics/HIV treatments. You tell me where the private money is going - potential cash cows that will bring more profits to shareholders, or real cures?
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
If you want to ignore the cure for Cancer that's being held back and stored in the warehouse next to the automobile engine that runs on sea water by the guy who really WAS on the grassy knoll then I guess that's your business but you need to open your eyes and see the black helicopters for what they are.
Which aliens by the way? Was it the skinny ones with the cold hands or the taco that craps ice cream?
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
It's very hard to possess the long-term vision to say, "we cannot violate this patent, and so patients who could have been saved by doing so will die."
The point here seems to be how many patients have to die before this reasoning ceases to make sense. One? Ten? A thousand? A million?
I believe you lost your perspctive somewhere - the Spanish Flu in the late 1910's killed tens of millions around the world. The scientific community has been estimating that a new epidemic derived from the bird flu virus has a much more lethal potential since the virus would be able to spread throughtout the whole world in a matter of weeks.
So, we are talking here about breaking a patent because whole countries could be wiped out if the medicine is not available, not "some patients".
It's called imminent domain. :-)
Why is this moderated to +5, Funny. There's nothing funny, or +5 worthy about this parent post. Somebody help.
And dictated what price they would pay. Arguably, the Anthrax scare was not a public health issue - there were alternatives, and it was not a money issue - it was blatent opportunistic patent busting. There is much also much USA patent busting dirty linen connected with Asprin, and before that knitting mills and pineapples.
Bird Flu and SAR's is 50% fatal - it is a public health issue. However Taiwan cannot. The natural plant that makes it in China is all 'bought up', and China is not likely to supply Taiwan. Thus if Taiwan can produce, their patentable mass production synthesis process is in the worlds best interest. Like USA, Taiwan is right to invoke 'war/national emergency' provisions.
Interestingly, the failure of USA to make flu vaccinations free/cheap or compulsory (remember the shortage) has put it at perilous risk by creating a pool of unimmunised carriers/spreaders for mutations to latch onto, were an outbreak to occur. Europes solution is to give out free flu shots, and bars of soap for more handwashing.
I think more than anything what we need is user feedback on the medical system. People need to discuss their treatments in forums. They need to publicly rate and track particular doctors.
I'd like to see caps on malpractice claims... but only if the doctor compensates their patient immediately after they become aware of the problem. If they delay or try to avoid paying when they know that there's a problem or should reasonably know, they lose the protection. That way doctors would be encouraged to address every medical malpractice issues rather than waiting for inefficient lawsuits to resolve the problem.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
It is within the law for the government to expropriate private property for the common good, at least in Canada and the US and I'm sure other countries have similar laws.
So if patents are considered property couldn't a government simply expropriate it.
You get a big hoopla when it is the property of a multinational but when it is John Doe's house because the government wants to widen the highway not a peep.
What is particularly unfortunate is that many drugs (including tamiflu and the superior inhaled drug relenza) were invented by relatively small biotechs. (OK, Gilead isn't small any more, but Biota is *tiny*). Small biotechs are absolutely reliant on the fees and royalties they generate through licensing their inventions to Big Pharma, who have the money to get them through the FDA approval process and marketed.
Break a patent for Roche or GSK, they'll be annoyed but hardly notice the change in cash-flow. The biotech, however, will lose its sole cash-flow life-line. Biota are collaborating with Japanese pharma Sankyo to produce a second-generation antiviral for influenza that looks like being needed once-weekly for both prophylaxis and treatment. Be a real pity to destroy promising biotech-level research like that by cutting profits at the Big Pharma end of town.
Disclaimer: Yes I work for a biotech - own shares in them too.
So far as I understand it, the reasoning isn't to take profit away from Roche. The problem is that while Tamiflu is very effective at preventing the flu, there simply isn't enough should H5N1 mutate into a human -> human transferable virus. A single dose of Tamiflu will protect a single person from contracting the flu for a single day. Given that the typical flu season is roughly 100 days, give or take, each person would need 100 doses to protect themselves. Right now, the Canadian gov't has stockpiled approximately 22 million doses. As of July of this year, Canada's population, according to the CIA world factbook, is 32,805,041 people, that's less than 1 dose per person. Canada alone would need 100x the current amount to protect the majority of it's population from a pandemic of H5N1, let alone the rest of the world. The patent would be broken to allow for more companies to create the drug, rather than Roche alone who simply can't meet the current demand.
With the world flu panic boosted by a simple marketing campaign, did anyone noticed arctic penguins have immunity to bird flu?
There you are, staring at me again.
You know, using the collective intelligence or will of either the leader or people of two nations, combined with the experience of other countries and peoples in similar positions, to tread a path that benifits the most and harms the least of all possible paths? I'm sure force works, but is it the *only* way of going about things? Hardly. Am I saying that we shouldn't use force? Not in this post; let's assume it's an acceptable way of doing things.
You sir are totally closeminded and totally need to get out more.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
It's SO obligitory... ..that it's been said by dozens of people two days before you...
They are some of the most unethical businesses around. DOes anyone realise that legally a drug company could have found a good cure for HIV, or Cancer, and decide through profit analysis that it is worth more to them to keep treating the disease rather than cure it. They patent the procedure/enzyme/Gene and then no one else has access to their research, or can produce a product based on that patent. I wonder what sort of negotiations Taiwan put forward which were rejected by Roche. I wonder what price they put on the drug? Could they not have agreed under very specific circumstances to allow the creation of the drug? Is it that if there IS a pandemic too bad for the rest of the world if Roche can't produce enough of this drug, at the end of the pandemic they'll make billions so good for them? Is that what it's about? Human lives too often become reduced to numbers on a profit-loss chart. I say good for Taiwan.
-Gel214th
While i agree with the sentiment, can't you extend that argument to say we should ignore all medical patents even within the US. But without *some* kind of protection from cheap cloning of drugs this might result in many drugs never being developed.
All that R&D money would be spent on other things, and who knows what might be developed. Drugs developed under patent protection is what is seen. But what is unseen?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
I imagine that the military, CIA, NSA and other agencies have quite a few procedures for this, but they won't tell you.
Big business are very close to these spy agencies and frequently ignore patent and copyright laws. Example include when Boeing got help from the Air Force to spy on Airbus and Lockheed Martin, another Russia's position that their country's spy agencies must spy on big business. So, uhm, yeah, there are precedents.
The basic difference that most here are failing to grasp is the the Avian Flu is going to be a pandemic initially spread by water fowl with its victims not having much of a say in contracting a virus with a ~30% lethality in healthy adults while HIV is 100% preventable by keeping one's penis in one's pants(with the notable exception of the 8 year old females being raped as a cure for AIDS in SubSaharan Afrika). Read that again, ~30% of healthy adults that get this virus die. Die, as in dead. Not coming back. No reboot. No sequel. No Version 2.0.
The kicker is that this virus saw Tamiflu early on in Viet Nam and now exhibits some resistance to Tamiflu, so stockpiling Tamiflu may be grasping at straws to control this pandemic. One thing to keep in mind about antiviral medications such as Tamiflu, Amantadine, Rimantidine and Relenza they are only effective if take within 24-48 hours onset of symptoms. If you miss that window the medication is really useless. And are you really trusting of FEMA or any other government bureaucracy to show up at your house within 24 hours of you starting to have symptoms of a flu with a ~30% lethality rate??
Patents are a proper way of protecting your invention. There is however in my opinion no excuse for extortion. This world has about had enough of money grabbing robber barons that use other peoples missery to make a buck.
Science used to be something that was done to benefit mankind. These days it seems people can stand happily by and watch many die just because they want to make a quick buck. Just look at the aids situation in africa. I think that's a crime against humanity and should be treated as such.
Roche is a very rich company. They do not see a possible threat to millions....they see an opportunity to make millions and millions of dollars. The price will be hiked up because of demand and they are laughing all the way to the bank.
I think patents for non essential machines are ok. I think patents for medicine are ok to as long as we make sure they are not used to extort people. Roche has an obligation here. We, the people that use their medicine daily, have made them rich. Time to do something back now.
I cannot feel any pitty for a company capitalising on other peoples missery.
This meant that if one's house was on fire and a competing firefighting truck saw the house in flames, it would roll on by. After all, you had a contract with a different firefighter. Eventually, people figured out that this was a silly arrangement and we collectively paid to fight fires in the country regardless of where they were; we nationalized firefighting.
What is so odd about this? Presumably you contracted with a firefighting company that had a good response rate, so as long as the fire is out in time, why do you care if somebody else isn't sprining to action.
Presumably you could have a market where you'd pay big money to a fire protection company, and they would have peering agreements with other companies in case they were too busy to respond. You'd put a plate on your house stating that company xyz is to put out fires, but if you see it burning for 15 minutes and they haven't shown up, you'll pay the non-contract rate for anybody who shows up.
I am curious as to whether anyone is looking at Lend-Lease style arrangements for pandemic drugs? Say "owners" of drugs (we as a society arbitrarily say that they can "own" an idea) are paid a modest amount for production of critical drugs on the condition that those supplies are only used for national health. In return, these stocks are not released into the commercial market. This should not represent lost sales, as I doubt any public health budget would have the funds to buy all these drugs at the sticker price; in fact such sales should be in addition to what they'd get anyway.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Actually, if I'm making a mistake it's in assuming that a "top health official" (FTFA) is not a politician, which might, in fact, be a mistake. Anyways, your point is well taken.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
> they're availing themselves of a contractual provision.... this means the gov't doesn't have to compensate the IP holder
Unless of course the contract provides for compensation after the event, which it almost certainly does. Still can save time in an emergency - not haggling over the cost beforehand.
Not to rain too much on this lovely parade, but you're nowhere near as right as you used to be. Things have changed a lot in the past few years.
I'm a doctor. Licensed, boarded, and practicing full-time. I haven't personally seen a drug representative in the past four years. I work at several hospitals; the tertiary-care teaching hospital I'm attending at today no longer permits drug companies to buy lunch for residents. Nobody is going on drug-company sponsored trips. There are still some docs who go to the educational dinners (I don't, mostly, because if I'm going to go out to dinner I prefer to choose better company), but the educational part of the discussion is now done by independent practitioners and they are strictly required to disclose any financial conflicts of interest.
I'm also on the Medication Safety committee (formerly the Pharmacy and Therapeutics committee) at the new hospital in my neighborhood. This committee must approve all medications on formulary at the hospital. Not only are drug representatives not seen at these meetings, but they are banned from the hospital. They are allowed to contact the manager of the pharmacy, but are strictly forbidden to give any gifts of any kind (even promotional freebies). Even the infant formula representatives are banned, and the hospital is not allowed to accept free formula, or free drugs, or other "free" incentives. We do, of course, negotiate the best deals on drugs that we can get, but the actual deal-negotiation occurs separately from the review and approval of these drugs.
I buy my own pens and office stationary at Office Depot. My sticky-notes say "Post-It" on the wrapper like anyone else's.
I'm not saying that all doctors are like me. There are probably a whole bunch of them who do things the old way and who suck up all the free stuff they can get in exchange for listening to the detail rep speak. But I don't actually know any docs like that any more. There's a huge ethical concern about the issue, and it's not going away.
And the drug companies know it. They're changing tactics rapidly.
Notice how many drug ads are on the television these days? Want to know where the money for marketing is being spent? Don't look at me, look at the mirror. These days, the patients themselves are the targets for the drug companies. The days of lavish incentives for physicians and parmacists are passing fast, and good riddance.
"Combination" patents and line extensions are very real, but they don't usually add that much, since you can't patent a new indication, you have to patent a new medication. Meaning you have to test it, in detail, and release it only after the FDA approves it. Generally these line-extension patents add a few years to the patented use of the drug, but only if you and your doctor are too stupid to use the non-combination meds. Claritin-D is patented. Taking a generic loratadine tablet along with a generic pseudoephedrine tablet is not only not patented, it's about a tenth the price.
Fortune ran an article this month on this very subject. Had a nice scientific angle to it, rather than just an emotional-political bias. Also illustrates that lovely topic "natural selection" or "evolution" to be perfectly rude.
The gist of it is, if you dump Tamiflu into the environment to save a bunch of chickens, which is what the Asian governments are discussing [not, as you might think, to save a few sidereal infected humans] you're going to destroy Tamiflu's effectiveness. To put this in perfect perspective for you, if THEY push Tamiflu into the environment when the virus hasn't even crossed over to a human pandemic state, the virus will adapt, and by the time it's crossed over and YOU are SICK AND DYING, Tamiflu will have zero affect on the virus, and YOU will have no defense, making your chance of death about 25% based on historical projections. So Monday, when you get to work, look around, and imagine 1/4 of those people not there because some fucking QUACK in ASIA had to save some DUCKS.
Some cultural suffering v. My survival = ROAST DUCK Here's more background material from Foreign Affairs, written by some smart people that may shed additional light on the subject.
...not to invent drugs anymore.
I understand the moral choice of the Taiwanese goverment, but while caring for their population, they are also sending a bad signal to the patentholders.
Isn't it a good thing that Roche are making a drug like that in the first place?
Is it really beneficial to disencourage them to make the drug?
IMHO, the old "whip and carrot"-trick should not be ignored, especially on a large scale.
I think if the Taiwanese government wanted to assert a moral stance they should determine an amount they think is reasonable to pay the patent holder, Roche. Set this amount of money aside and should the courts come after them then offer this "reasonable" amount as compensation. If Taiwan thinks $0 is reasonable then the court rules in favor of Roche, end of story...
Except that the Tamiflu isn't the golden answer to bird flu.
It only works efficiently against spreading when taken within the first hours of exposure/infection.
- You don't need *that* much quantity of Tamiflu. You only need it for 5 days, to keep the virus quantity low, until you body manage to produce anti-bodies. Once you produce them, you're cured, and can never be infected by the same strain, and so won't need any more meds until next year's new flu. (Also needs can seem exagerated, because stocks are quickly deplated, because stupid people start stock-piling meds. I've seen it in my neighborhood. If distribution of meds is better controlled, the current stocks should better suffice. Basically, Taiwan is lacking meds, because a lot of europeans have enough stocks in their basement to cure a small town.)
- You need the Tamiflu to be properly prescibed by a doctor. (The doctor must detect, using proper diagnosis equipement, if the virus is exactly H5N1 or some other running-nose-causing virus, and if it's still in the time frame when Tamiflu is effective).
The risk regions that can see a lot of bird-to-human infections are the poor remote region where the population and livestocks live in close proximity.
But these aren't the region where you have a lot of doctors, equipement, or good stocks of meds.
And if you provide meds to uninformed people, they may start taking the meds when inappropriate, thus not only having little effect against, but even helping the bird flu virus to mutate and acquire resistence to the anti-viral drug.
This is a known effect of the evolution : widespread random use of anti-biotics made bactria evolve and become resistant to antibiotics (my subject of research. Some strains of Staphylococcus Aureus are resistant to almost everything (VRSA). The good news are, on the countrary of bird flu, these VRSAs are harmless to most humans, only very small risk population may get sick).
Same also happens with AIDS (the HIV strain inside a patient evolves to resist the particular drugs the patient is taking. This is less a problem in rich countries with good health insurances, because for them a lot of different anti-viral drugs are available, and by cycling between different combination of drugs, you can still extend the patient's life expectancy almost indefinetly, albeit with an awful quality of life full of side effects, and with a *very* high cost - hence the problems in poorer country).
And, really bad news, the same has been observed by WHO in Vietnam - some bird flu specimen have mutated and become imune to anti-viral drug. (If such strains become wide-spread, we're doomed !)
So what Taiwan (and rest of Asia) needs isn't that much industial production of meds, as they need medical personnal to better handle the problem while avoiding creating resisting mutants (and they need also the stupid Europeans to stop stockpiling Tamiflu boxes. Quit that now ! It's useless !)
Although the idea "patents mustn't stop us from saving lifes" is good, showering Asia with industrial quantities of meds is mostly going to lead to a disaster full of resisting-mutants.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If the government can take my property for the "public good", why can't it take the property of the drug companies?
If all drugs that are protected by patents have their rights violated, and imagine their huge profits become negligible, where would be the incentive of private companies to pay 'scientists' to 'research' these drugs... and then where would the incentive be for 18 year olds to decide on a career wearing a white coat and mixing crazy chemicals all day long.
Then in a hundred years when the next Bird Flu comes around, there won't be a patented drug around to fight it.
Ideals are great, in an ideal world.
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Governments Giveth and Governments Can Take Away. Any company can have their incorporation status revoked - if they are not behaving in the nation's interest. Depends which country(s) Roche is incorporated in. On the other hand why not charge Roche - with "Crimes Against Humanity" in the International Courts in the Hague! Or is this really all about Asiatic "population control" by a sub contractor to the C.I.A!?
Noone should think twice is violating a patent will save lives, but appreciate (As they say they do) that if a patenting system wasnt in place, the private companies would not have brought about these drugs, etc etc.
So you are violating the reason this drug was feasible to research in the first place. Sad but true.
It could be a baseless argument though.
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The Taiwanese government could conceivably change the rules to impose new requirements for generic drug licensing in emergencies. Or they could simply change the laws to set royalty rates to a fixed amount, same as is done in the case of licensing of jukeboxes and phonograph records in the U.S., producers of competing records can negotiate a license directly or obtain a compulsory license for something around 3c per record or 1/2c per minute of running time, whichever is more. So they could simply change the laws to recognize that there is an emergency and the property rights holder refuses to negotiate at a rate the government considers fair and set a statutory rate.
Or they could simply impose an excise tax on those types of patents which are not licensed at 700% of worldwide revenues. Failure to pay the tax results in loss of patent royalties or ability to sue for nonpayment, or expiration of the patent. The company can't pay 7 times its total income they can't pay the tax (which is the whole point) and then the government isn't violating any laws. This presumes the government can break the law; in some legal systems such a concept is not considered possible. Most countries have maintenance fees on patents; if the maintenance fee is high and due monthly, it could be impossible to pay, or be equivalent to the amount the government has to pay in royalties above what it thinks is appropriate, which solves the problem.
The ability to exclude others or to collect royalties is not a natural right; it is a privelege granted by government statute, and the government can change the rules. Beyond that, I really wonder if there was that much money available from licensing fees in Taiwan to be worth bothering.
Also, as a result of the Nazi War Crimes Trials at Nuremberg, Germany, it was declared that in certain cases where it is necessary to save lives or to prevent certain crimes it is permissible to break the law. This might be a better argument to use, that after trying to negotiate in good faith, the only answer to prevent potential death was to go ahead and violate the patentholder's rights. This may be the tack those in the Taiwanese government have decided to use.
It's one thing to demand all the traffic can bear during normal times; squeeze people when there's an emergency and it could turn around and bite you.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Mandatory licensing of copyrights or patents is one possible solution to some of the IP problems today.
In short: People forget the original meaning of "the law". People forget that the law was created to protect human beings. People think (and organizations such as WIPO and WTO strongly support this illusion) that the law is here to protect equally both people and businesses. This is not ethical, this is lie.
:-(
I think that WTO and WIPO are more strong then any army or political decision. We live in globalized world where the "states" has less power then anytime before. Instead the "global business" interests are the real world ruler. Globalized businesses are cross-country phenomenon thus impossible to be controlled by single country (yes, even USA is out of control of its own outgrown companies - originally US companies that are presently really "homeless companies" or "companies that are home anywhere" if you like). It is extremely difficult to fight something that is omnipresent...
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
Please explain that to the people who will die in 10 to 15 years
because they can't afford the drugs. Oh Sorry its just business.
Dickhead.
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So, if there is just a potential of a problem we can ignore anyone's IP rights? That's a very slippery slope as it begs the question -- Who is the one to decide when the potential problem is bad enough? Is one death enough to void the rights? Two, one hundred? What if close to 50,000 people died?
What if no one died but just productivity suffered which lead to economic strife? Roche which probably spent hundreds of millions of dollars researching this issue would then deserve to forfeit it's research money because of a potential threat. Why should they invest any more money in researching any vaccines if they will just be taken over without compensation?
What about the situation of voiding a patent on a drug which lowers blood pressure. According to the American Heart Association in 2002, 49,707 in the U.S. died from high blood pressure. Can Taiwan make the case to void the patents on drugs which lower blood pressure because of the immediate deaths it is causing now? Clearly people are dying from this now, why not void IP rights?
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Mod the parent up, guys.
It is an excellent and well researched rebuttal to the disinformation in the grandparent thread. Don't jump the gun on spreading FUD of economic benefits every time.
For your first question, the answer is thus. We know China has aspirations of regaining Taiwan because they've explicitly stated that to be the case. In terms of Taiwan, we know they want to be a nation of their own, because they've explicitly stated that to be the case.
The debate isn't pointless, it is ill informed. I've repeatedly pointed you to the references I've used. You seem to have no references except the heresay which you've heard in the pub. There are established means by which to gauge the military capacity of any country. You obvioulsy aren't familiar with them.
An on second thoughts, this is perhaps pointless. You make no effort to justify your claims, and your analogies are ridiculous. For the record, look up on google the defensive capabilities of China and Taiwan. This small bit of illegitimate research will correct you most recent opinion.
Roche developed Tamiflu with Gilead, an American Company. Gileads ex-chairman is your very own Donald "conflicts of self interest" Rumsfeld, emphasis on conflicts of course. His cabal profit from war why not disease?
Note this quote from the BBC article: "The government has said it will not market the drug commercially."
I don't believe this. My guess is that the government won't, but someone else will.
The problem with taking the patents at will like this is it can have a strogly corrosive effect on drug research.
Drug companies spend billions researching drugs. If they feel that a particular avenue of research will not yeild returns comensurate with the financial risks taken disocovering it, then they will cease lines of research that are prone to governmental takings. And focus more on "lifestyle" drugs that aren't so highly at risk.
So in the short term some lives may be saved. In the long term there may be les sincentive to research new treatments, for new drugs. And HIV is FAR from the last disease that mankind will be faced with.
I say let them make their profits. Especially on a disease that is readily avoidable.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Here is a link for the 37CFR at s-edison.info.nig.gov ... Patents can be broken if a national interest demands it.
The Wright Brothers mistakenly tried to extend their patent to the physics of how a wing works. If they had stuck to "no one can make wing-warping control surfaces except us", then no one would have, and they'd still have their patent. Glenn Curtiss had the much better aileron system, which we still use today, the Wrights saw that they might be marginalized, and sued him like mad, and eventually the patent got revoked.
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(1) Why would any wealthy company pour HUGE amount of money into research on how to cure/prevent a disease that's not prevalent in their own country, and thereby preventing the poorer nations (who naturally cannot match the monetary and scientific power of the wealthier nations) from able to obtaining patent for themselves?!!
I'm not against patent rights on universally commercial products.
But to me, there is something despicable in patenting a drug for diseases MOST common in poorer nations or OTHER nations in general.
Think about it. If Taiwan and US started researching into the same drug, there is NO WAY Taiwan could match US in getting the patent first.
US, then would have a drug patent for a disease that might be most damaging to Taiwan, thus holding Taiwan to virtual legal hostage with a patent, primed for extortion.
*To apply the legal question: Here is how I would settle it. If IP is like property, then property can be trespassed upon by PRIVATE/PUBLIC necessity, and there is nothing like a disease for a "public necessity".
Use by "public necessity" would still require compensation to the owner, but at a fair market price value, depending on cost of research and reasonable interest of return, but would not entitle the owner of IP to UNREASONABLE profit through the misery of others.
So, what are the specifics in the case of Taiwan? Are they currently being affected by the avian flu? If not, is it a given that they will be? If so, how long have they known? If they have had sufficient notice couldn't they have made equitable negotiations with Roche to obtain the needed quantities of the medicine they want/need? If the specifics point to their political leaders simply trying to get off cheap then I would concede, it would be wrong. It would also be reprehensible if their citizens were negatively impacted in either case, but we all know that governments don't always do what's best for the people...
It should be noted that Tamiflu is NOT a cure for the disease at any rate. It is simply the best option available. People may still die no matter how Taiwan obtains this drug...
And in the case of Taiwan and Roche, it's not like we're talking about the truly destitue, who lack the resources to prepare ahead of time, no matter how much warning they're given. It's not that Taiwan can't pay Roche's price; it's that they don't want to pay Roche's price. But they also don't want to pay the price of doing the research themselves. How can this possibly lead to a moral solution?
If that is the case, I have no answer for it and I would say your point is valid--they would simply be ripping Roche off. However, if Roche is unable to meet the demand for the drug then Taiwan wouldn't be totally in the wrong to produce it themselves and then finish negotiating licensing would they?
If, as you suggest, Roche is doing the work on behalf of everybody else, including Taiwan, then doesn't it follow that Taiwan should appreciate their efforts and contribute to them by paying for the results of those efforts?
Yes. They should come to an agreement with Roche. Again, though, if Roche cannot meet the demands for the drug in the required timeframe and Taiwan can produce it themselves, why not? Pay the bill later. If it helps keep the afflicted from dying, then take care of the immediate problem and work out an equitable payment to Roche. Life before money.
I appreciate the work that drug companies do in R&D and they should be compensated. However it is not like the Taiwanese government is raiding their facilities and stealing pills off of the shelves. In fact I would think it would be to Roche's advantage to license the formula to them and let them produce a generic. I would think that such a deal would be money in the bank for them. No production, QA, or distribution costs would be incurred. It would be all profit.
Yes, it would be inefficient for each country to invent their own wheel. But it doesn't follow that the one guy who did invent the wheel has to give it away free to anybody who needs or wants the wheel.
I don't expect a manufacturer to give away their "wheels" for free. But surely if they also own the patent they can license their design for a reasonable fee, particularly when it is going to save lives. Life before money--my governing principle in the discussion of course...
You also seem to be suggesting that any company that is motivated by profit instead of charity is acting immorally. That may be, but I don't see how it's relevant. Taiwan still isn't doing their own work, and they still aren't paying somebody else to do the work for them, but they still expect to get the work results for free