this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
501 points (98.3% liked)

World News

39158 readers
2370 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News [email protected]

Politics [email protected]

World Politics [email protected]


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

"Multidrug resistant tuberculosis is a growing threat, and bedaquiline is essential to curing it. Generic bedaquiline will drive down the cost of the drug by over 60%, allowing far more communities to access and distribute treatment. Evergreening the patent will cost so many lives over the next four years, which Johnson & Johnson knows. They must drop their efforts to enforce the secondary patents."

"Tell Johnson and Johnson that evergreening their patent on bedaquiline, which will deny millions of people access to live-saving treatment, is a violation of their corporate credo: https://secure.ethicspoint.com/domain... Tell them on twitter: https://twitter.com/JNJNews and https://twitter.com/JNJGlobalHealth Tell them on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jnj/ Tell them on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jnj/?hl=en And tell them wherever else you can. Tell your friends. Tell your family. Tell the Internet. This must not be allowed to happen.

Big thanks to TB expert Dr. Carole Mitnick and MSF's Christophe Perrin for helping me to understand the complexities of drug patents!"

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] assassin_aragorn 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

At its core, there's two competing ideas here, and neither are inherent corporate greed (although that's certainly the motivation for JJ).

  1. Whoever discovers or creates something brand new should have the exclusive rights to create/use that for X time. This rewards and encourages innovation, and companies recoup the cost of research.

  2. A medical discovery which helps people should be as widely and readily accessible as possible.

The second has to be achieved no matter what, so the question is how you provide a profit motive for discovery while not making the product exclusive. What if instead of exclusivity, the creator received preferential treatment? The government buys X of the new drug, and the creator can supply that full amount -- if they can't though, then others can fill the gap. This needs more consideration, but the basic idea is that the creator gets to sell their supply first, and others can sell after that.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Yeah...You need to profit to incentivize innovation and r&d. Fine.

Why does that mean you should get total control? Especially for drugs - for many reasons (it's a very messed up industry), but most of all because public health affects all of us - not just when we're directly connected to the victims.

Already, patents are basically a temporary monopoly. The government sets all sorts of weird limits. It's not a free market, not even remotely close

So why should they get total control instead of fixed percentage by anyone making the drug? Maybe limited to time frame, maybe based on a multiple of cost

Hell, uncle Sam pays for a lot of this research, and the big players spin off subsidiaries to subsidize the risk. We could offer bounties or make the research fully public. There's so many ways to do this better

Instead, we use a method where corporations get to make decisions, with zero concern over the cost in lives, or the drain on society it causes

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Whoever discovers or creates something brand new should have the exclusive rights to create/use that for X time. This rewards and encourages innovation, and companies recoup the cost of research.

I think it's important to distinguish the underlying goal from the mechanism used to achieve this. (In software user story development we distinguish between the "so that" and the "I want".)

So I would restate this as:

Whoever discovers or creates something brand new should have the ability to profit substantially from their discovery or invention.

This does not need to be via a period of exclusivity. Exclusivity is one way of doing it, and it's a pretty good one, but jumping ahead to that shortcuts the ability to come up with other possibilities.

[–] assassin_aragorn 3 points 1 year ago

Agreed. There's other ways to accomplish this, and that should be the case for medicines.