“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!"
“Tell massive heartless corporation to not make every single penny possible!”
Corporation: “We must say with a heavy heart that we’ve lost our communications department. They all died of hysterical laughter after receiving a request to put people over profit.”
They had 20 years. At some point, you stop asking corporations to do things and start making them do things. 20 years seems like a reasonable place to start.
What’s truly comical is that all the people in charge of those corporations probably took ethics classes in business school.
Gotta know ethics and law well if you wanna abuse it.
You’re right that corporate incentives are completely messed up, but when something like this generates negative press it hurts their brand and potentially their bottom line down the road as a result. If they do reverse course it certainly won’t be out of the goodness of their hearts.
Not like we can buy the drug elsewhere /:
This is why I am pro-public healthcare. A market isn’t a free market if I die when I don’t buy your product.
That was very well articulated!