“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!"
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.