“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!"
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