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Brazil Voids Merck Patent On AIDS Drug
JoeBackward writes "Merck has this useful anti-AIDS drug Elfavirenz, and Brazil has lots of poor people with AIDS. So, after trying really hard to get Merck to cooperate on pricing, the Brazilian government has decided to take a 'compulsory license' to the patent, and get the drug from a factory in India. This compulsory license is basically a way to take the patent by eminent domain." This move gives Brazil one more thing in common with Thailand, both of which have blocked YouTube. Thailand's compulsory licensing of Elfavirenz and Plavix has landed the country on the US's watch list for piracy.
Agreed. Good for them, it's good to see a country looking out for the welfare of its own citizens ahead of the profits of some multinational corporation.
I remember seeing that "Brazil blocks Youtube" thing on slashdot, but seriously, I tested it back then, and there was no block, I talked to everyone I know, and they also noted no block. Not that one wasn't issued though, it probably was never enforced.
It was a BS case anyway, it was a public beach, everyone was there to see them having sex. If anyone was breaking the law, they were. Of course, with the justice system here as corrupt and moronic as it is, those kinds of rulings aren't surprising. Believe me though, 100% of the Brazilian people would be against any sort of ban.
as a matter of fact, brazil stopped blocking youtube three days after the ban was actually set. And not all ISPs complied with the ruling, only one, Brasil Telecom, which is responsible for broadbrand in all southern states.
Sorry to disappoint, but there's a lot of people inside drug companies that give a lot of shit about people. I personally know I could be making a hell of a lot more money in the financial industry than I do in pharma. Why have lobbiests & etc to deal w/ governmental issues? Tell ya what, when the HMO's, AARP, & etc quit pushing the government to expropriate drugs & give them away for free, the companies would be more than happy to drop the government affairs and get back to doing science. But in the current climate, if you don't lobby, your interests will get buried. And then, once the investors realize that there are no more paying customers, you'll have no drug industry. Hope there's good leaches around in a few years when you decide to get sick.
Where get the $1e9 dollars per drug? Lots of places. Here's a couple:
The Tufts CSDD studies is a good source, their estimate was $900 mil four years ago.
Medical News Today estimates $1.2 billion for a new biological
Essentially, when you want the drug companies to give away a drug, you want to expropriate their property. As an investor, ask yourself whether you're willing to put your money into an industry that's subject to expropriation, and think about whether you want a drug industry around or not the next time a pesky little virus emerges from the forrest.
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
FTFA:
Talks over the price of Merck's drug, Efavirenz, broke off on Thursday when the health ministry rejected the New Jersey-based company's offer to cut its $1.59 per pill price by 30 percent. Brazil wanted to pay what Merck charges Thailand, or $0.65 per pill.
They TRIED to negotiate, and Merck put up a wall. So, in effect, Merck DID refuse Brazil.
9 years in alot of cases is too long to wait for a life saving drug millions of people need now. The way things are going though, the wait for a patent to expire will last alot longer than 9 years....
Noone writes jokes in base 13!
You have to physically perform an action which every semi-intelligent person knows carries the risk of AIDS (unprotected sex, sex with a stranger, sharing needles, etc) to get AIDS.
Oh goody, the moralistic argument.
First, it needn't surprise you that there are all kinds of ways one person can compel another to engage in sexual intercourse. And I'm not just talking about rape and prostitution either.
Second, there are all kinds of ways one person can come into contact with another's blood. In a country with a sufficiently high HIV prevalence, any car accident, mugging, or fistfight might result in infection. And while the First World now has pretty good testing regimes for blood transfusions, are you sure that's the case everywhere?
If you think every fistfight is voluntary: on CBC radio a couple of weeks ago, they had an example (from Tanzania I believe) where a guy had gotten beat up while defending his elderly neighbour's house from burglars, and contracted HIV in the process.
So cut the moralizing "they all made their choices" crap.
I love how the US has put Thailand on its watch list for piracy even though compulsory licensing is completely legal under internation patent agreements. This is the only reason we don't see a lot more poor countries doing the same thing: even though it's legal, they get leaned on by the US gov't because the pharmacy companies are whining about their profits.
See a decent explanation of compulsory licensing here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license
Brazil has fulfilled the "attempts to obtain a licence under reasonable commercial terms must have failed over a reasonable period of time" requirement. As others have mentioned, they have threatened this before. Another nice loophole that was or soon will be closed is that India's patent system only allow a process to be patented, not an end product. This allowed production of AIDS drugs at cost. But of course, India has been under pressure to 'normalize' its patent laws (ie make them the same as US laws) and this loophole will be closed either this year or next. Unfortunate, as the availability of cheap drugs from India has been a major factor in forcing pharmaceutical companies to negotiate prices.
I live in Spencerport, NY in Upstate New York. My High School had an abstinence only curriculum. The class considered anything else to be completely unacceptable. This is the public High School. I hope _YOU_ haven't ever been to the U.S., this is very common around here.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
References please?
I'm not the OP, but sure, you only have to google around for a bit:
"Teens Need Access to Contraceptives, Not Abstinence Messages, To Reduce Pregnancy, STD Rates, AAP Report Says" (AAP: American Academy of Pediatrics). http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?n
Original report here:
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
- Sales revenue: 22,636.0
So where does the money go?- Manufacturing costs: 6,001.1
- Marketing & adminstrative costs: 8,165.4
- R&D: 4,782.9
Only 20% of the price of each pill goes toward future research and development... Marketing & administrative costs are double that. Ouch.In fact there are at least two such drugs. Premarin is actually made from Pregnant Mare Urine (get it) by a process that is a trade secret. No one is entirely sure which of the components of the final product are active and which aren't. As a result, last I checked (a couple of years ago), no one had successfully developed a generic. A similar situation exists for Thalidomide (which is now a very effective treatment for Multiple Myeloma and a somewhat less effective treatment for other cancers). The drug is in fact a pro-drug that is only active when metabolized by the liver. Unfortunately, the liver generates >100 different metabolites, some of which are very short-lived. No one actually knows which of these is active. As a result, development of analogs (which I have been involved in) has been significantly hampered.
P.S. those who say that FDA has anything to do with funding for clinical trials have no idea what they are talking. Typically, a company pays for ALL therapy-related medical care for trial participants, they pay for data managers at treatment centers, they pay for the physicians who treat the patients, they pay for tests, they pay their own data managers, their own trials managers, and finally, THE DRUG COMPANY pays the FDA to review their application (through user fees). In fact, I seem to recall having read recently that the approval process at FDA actually generates surplus revenue. Finally, during the trials process, before manufacturing is mass scale, drug costs can be hundreds of dollars a dose. By the time one factors in that only a fraction of drugs that begin trials are actually approved, it is easy to imagine drug approval costing hundreds of millions of dollars (even though the pivotal trial(s) itsel "only" cost ~$100,000,000--~10,000/patient * ~1000 patients.)