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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.
it s nice to see humanity win one for a change
who can really put a price on that?
back in the day we didnt have no old school
you know what else Brazil and Thailand have in common? A boisterous tourism industry and hot girls. Seriously, what does youtube have to do with this story?
this is not about humanity. the only reason this drug even exists is becuase money was able to be spent on R&D to create or discover the compound. Brazil has just put another nail in the coffin of innovation by this move: if a company cannot make money from a discovery or invention the amount of both will decline.
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what happened was this: merck had the AIDS drug and Brazil tried to negotiate it at what they could afford, merck declined, Brazil then told merck to screw themselves and got the drug anyway. it isn't so much an attack on merck's ability to make money off its own research as it is the idiot practice of denying DYING people medical treatment for the sake of said profit. moral of story: better to negotiate then to be bypassed.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Because they're too busy farming your coffee and sewing your clothes for $3 a month?
Idiot.
This just highlights in a new way, how far wrong we have gone with our patient system. Imagine if Salk had demanded a premium for his polio vaccine, the US government would have taken it under the same premises. The same if the patient holder for Biothrax had withheld rights from the US government for the anthrax vaccine in 2002. But wait those are brown people, foreigners dying from a disease with a social stigma, so let's call them thieves.
We are all just people.
As they say: necessity is the mother of innovation. As long as we have a need for medicine, someone's going to do the research to look for it. It may become less easy to justify spending millions in funding and make millions in profits off of discoveries, but that doesn't mean that innovation will stop.
This move gives Brazil one more thing in common with Thailand, both of which have blocked YouTube.
This is a warped comparison... AIDS will hill hundreds of millions of people in our lifetime. YouTube is a floofy website. AIDS will still be a problem in 20 years. YouTube probably won't exist.
How are these two situations related, exactly? Are you trying to make some comparison because both involve "Intellectual Property"? If so, you failed.
> Rather than making the composition of the drug open, don't release what's actually in it,
:)
> and just test it as a 'black box,' show empirically through tests that it's effective and
> reasonably safe, but dope the actual pills with a lot of random substances that make it
> difficult to reverse-engineer
I really can't forsee any form of DRM for chemical compounds. It's quite like DRM for music - at one point the music has to be played on a speaker. Similarly, if you're going to make a drug, you're going to have to give the pill out at which point you have the whole field of analytical chemistry (mass spec, HPLC etc) at your disposal!
Furthermore, adding random substances to it, doesn't really hinder the identification process - they'd just show up as separate peaks on the spectrum. In addition randomly adding substances to a drug mixture would probably mess up pharmacokinetics which would have to be restudied all over again.
Unfortunately the chemical world is a little bit messier than the digital world
Besides, even though they're not White Anglo-Saxon American Protestants, most Brazilians are people (some, of course, are special haircuts in your no-no zone), and if I have to choose between a lot of people dying and a bunch of lying thieves (converting gov't research money into private intellectual property for mega-corporations is evil in my opinion) getting richer, well, I'm going to pick the people (some of whom are always also going to be lying thieves), because I'm like that.
Honestly, though, it's the 21st century. As a race, humanity can do so much more for each other than this. Shrill cries of, "Let's give Merck our cash!" or "Pure capitalism would have fixed this!" just bother me. Capitalism is a good system, but it isn't magical, and we should try to avoid using it to price out a human life, or its span. Can we always avoid that? No, we're not on Star Trek. But it's nice to occasionally give it a try.
These countries are treading on a slippery slope. At what point is it OK now to not pay for the hard work of other people, or to begin to directly steal from them? If this happens enough the company will go bankrupt as correctly pointed out by the parent comment. There will always be someone else who can justify why their need is to get/steal/borrow what they need to a greater and greater extent.
Yes I know that giant pharm firms spend a lot on advertising, but it also costs approximately one Billion dollars to get a single new drug to the marketplace (that's $1,000,000,000 !!)
Pricing is a problem for the third world countries, probably because it takes so many resources to make that product.
Now please pay attention - I'm not saying that Brazil is unjustified in it's taking of the drug and helping those people, but rather that there needs to be some limits so that this behavior is not abused, and ruins it for everyone. This sounds like a good problem for the U.N.
..........FULL STOP.
Won't happen, because the companies will spend a lot of money on lobbying against it. If it was created, it would mean the end of them, so they'd do whatever in their power to prevent it.
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Stop believing big pharma's FUD.
There are several significant factors undercutting this supposed billion dollar price tag. The first is that AIDS research has received significant public funding, and second is that antiretroviral drugs have the shortest time to approval of any class of drugs, approximately half the time of normal clinical trials (the mean time for antiretrovirals is 44.6 months, compared to an industry average of 87.4 months).
See this report from Doctors Without Boarders for more information.
The people who did the work got paid. Its the corporation who is getting ripped off, not any people.
Reality has a liberal bias
Patents are government-granted monopolies. It is not an absolute right and has to be balanced against the need of the People.
Reading this news as a fight between corporate greed and governmental greed is the wrong way to look at that. Right or wrong, you try to choose the lesser evil. Everyday the little citizen get crushed for reason of State, for once it is a big pharma that pays the price.
BTW, the pharma spammer are quick on the button today. Disgraceful.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
Indeed. And when we're bankrupt we can go back to the rest of the world for help, right?
Right?
From your link: "This quantity was far greater than the supply, and Bayer lacked the capacity to produce such a large quantity in a timely manner."
Sounds like the manufacturers couldn't produce the drugs, so the government stepped in to ramp up production. Not exactly what you made it sound like.
I have nothing against capitalism as a rule, and I'm not naive enough to believe in some twee fantasy World where life-saving medications are free for everyone all around the World. That said, setting a price point on what is an ESSENTIAL medication of $1.59 per pill when the same company already sells the same product to another country at $0.65 per pill is disgusting. Merck are (or were) essentially holding the Brazilian peoples lives to ransom.
If Merck can afford to sell the product to Thailand for $0.65 and still make a profit (clearly as an Indian company can sell it for $0.45 and turn a profit themselves) then there is no reason whatsoever other than pure capitalistic greed why they could not have given the same offer to the Brazilian government. Don't forget we're not talking about the variable domain costs of marketing and staffing, the government is the customer - how the Brazilian government then choose to distribute/market the treatment is their decision and at their cost.
There are a great many products around the World that are sold for different prices to different regions, but in practically all cases you can permit the corporations involved some latitude simply because the products they're selling are luxury or otherwise non-essential. Gouging a customer with a 300%+ markup on a life-saving drug when you know the customer/market HAS to have it is disgusting.
Let's not forget that the research dollars that went into developing this particular drug came from U.S citizens.
I don't think this is a sign of "erosion of respect in American patents", this is after all the first time the Brazilian government has even invoked the power of "eminent domain".
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.
A "compulsory license" is not the same as "taking a patent", it's a compulsory license, as the name implies.
Furthermore, the term "eminent domain" simply doesn't apply to patents because patents aren't "private property". Patents are temporary monopolies granted by the government for a specific purpose, and revoking that grant when the patent doesn't accomplish its purpose is not the same as taking away "private property". The only thing the government is ultimately obligated to observe in the granting and revocation of patents is that it is done non-discriminatorily.
Trying to equate a patent grant with private property is ideological bullshit; don't fall for it.
The only company that could make it under license could only make a certain amount per year, and had no capacity to ramp up. They screwed around, claiming they could (but did nothing in particular). If they'd stepped forward and produced enough for the need, the US government would have happily paid the price.
The compulsory license wasn't about cost. It was about capacity. And the US DID pay a license fee to the company, instead of outright theft, as Brazil is doing.
On the other hand, with the amounts involved, if it was just a matter of a billion dollars to develop an AIDs drug, why didn't Brazil create their own and license it for free?
Oh, yeah - that billion dollars was for a SUCCESSFUL drug. They kinda left out the other hundred compounds they looked at, and the ten to twelve they actually tested, before the drug companies found that one drug that worked.
Then you get the ones that work, but turn up side effects when they get past trials. Vioxx, for example. major drug, well-liked by 99% of its users, and it wasn't until after they got it out into the open market that the (theoretical) side effects were noticed - and they were, truly, minor for pretty much everyone (tiny increases in health risks, and no actual deaths or injuries tied to the drug). And it was banned. Huge loss for the company.
Total actual cost to find a high-quality, high RISK new drug for a major disease, with full trials and liability coverage? Closer to five or TEN billion dollars...
Cost to produce some of these drug combinations? That's another story. Some of these chemicals take huge investments in machinery to even make, and the precursor chemicals alone put the price at ten to twenty cents per pill. Actual manufacturing can push the cost to simply produce one pill for some drugs into the multi-dollar range.
This is really total bull shit. Drug companies spend very little on R&D and most of their expenses are marketing, legal, insurance, and obscene bonuses for executives.
Eminent domain is needed for cases like this where the need of the people outweigh the need for a ceo to trim his jet interior in pure gold.
Good for Brazil
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Here's a Kaiser study - the$ billion dollar amount is only the R&D /FDA trial costs. What about when companies get sued by lawyers for billions of dollars for crap lawsuits - I.E. Dow chemical for silicone breast implants - bankrupted for no definite scientific evidence, and now people are using them again.
d ex.cfm?DR_ID=17747
The Vioxx lawsuit is costing Merck between 4 and 30 billion$ for some shaky scientific evidence. There were perhaps 300-400 people who doctors though had deaths DIRECTLY contributable to Vioxx - now remind you , many of these patients had crippling arthritis, pre-existing cardiac conditions, were over 70 years of age. I've had patients tell me that they take up to 4-5 times the recommended doses of pain medicine sometimes. Do you think the lawyers, or clients mention that - of course not - they want their easy money. Do you think many of those people would have died anyway? - probably.
IF you are involved in medicine, and have some money, you will get sued. Every doctor and pharmaceutical company does, and the cost gets passed on to everyone else in the form of a 65 cent pill, as opposed to a 30 cent pill. THese class action lawsuits make multi millions for many law firms, because enough people in menial jobs don't want to work anymore , and are "injured, or think they are" (actual line I heard from an ambulance chaser commercial).
Link to Kaiser/Tufts study supporting the billion dollar R&D/FDA cost per new drug below.
http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_in
..........FULL STOP.