World News

38527 readers

2139 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.

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

How to spot Misinformation and Propaganda

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

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

Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

501

Johnson and Johnson attempts to sacrifice millions of lives by restricting life saving tuberculosis drug (www.youtube.com)

submitted 1 year ago by WillyWonksters to c/world

32 comments fedilink hide all child comments

"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 40 points 1 year ago

So first of all, fuck Johnson and Johnson. Drug patents are weird because there's an inherent contradiction, but that in no way absolves the corporation.

The idea of a patent is something reasonable. If you discover a new process or invent a new product, you should get to uniquely benefit from it. You put in the hard work to research and develop it after all. Others shouldn't be able to just read what you did and go do it without having to do the work.

But what if that new product is a new medicine? Or a process to make an existing medicine much more quickly? Leaving you as the sole producer means you can charge really high prices for something lifesaving. And if you run low on stock, too bad to the buyers. That's absurdly immoral and wrong. If someone needs a medication, they should be able to affordably access it. This goes against the idea of a patent.

No matter what we do, the medicine should remain affordable and widely accessible. The question should be "How do we reward the inventor while maintaining the accessibility and affordability?", not "How do we make this accessible and affordable while maintaining the inventor's exclusivity?". Johnson and Johnson is asking the latter question, which is why they can go fuck themselves. As a society we need to ask the former question. How do we reward research and innovation without allowing people to die?

The patent process just doesn't work for this, and we need a new system. The government should be responsible for the distribution of the medicine, and it can maintain a high supply while still rewarding the inventor. Give the inventor preferential treatment, so that their supply is bought and used first. Any demand that they can't meet is filled by other manufacturers, who are free to produce the drug. Maintain this for 5 years before removing the exclusivity status. The idea needs some more refinement of course, but the general idea I think is a good one. By giving the inventor preferential treatment, you can still reward them while keeping the product cheap and plentiful.