patents
I recently received the following email from my friend and former roommate Nathalie. See my response below.
Subject: Tell Novartis to stop blocking inexpensive medicines for poor people
Drug company Novartis is challenging India's Patent law to prevent cheaper generic versions of its drugs being sold in India. If they win, this will threaten India's ability to produce affordable generic drugs, including HIV medicines, which are benefiting millions of people in India and other developing countries.
This could seriously impede poor people obtaining cheaper medicines and is against an international agreement that declares that developing countries can produce and import cheaper versions of medicines in the interests of public health.
Millions of poor people depend on these life-saving medicines.Please contact Novartis today and tell them to drop their lawsuit!
http://act.oxfamamerica.org/campaign/novartis?rk=h1ApEen18EsFW
My response:
1. Novartis is not doing anything illegal. They're simply appealing a previous court decision. The right to appeal is an important part of most judicial systems, and the drug company should not be denied this right. If their claim has no merit the Indian court will simply uphold the previous decision.
2. I think it's a bit pretentious to dictate the appropriate way for Indian courts to interpret and/or amend their own laws from half a world away. Establishing and enforcing effective and equitable intellectual property laws is at least as important to the future of a developing economy as access to inexpensive drugs.
3. Patent laws exist to encourage innovation and protect inventors' rights. If Indian generic drug makers were allowed to compete with Novartis, what would prevent them from selling these drugs outside of India - to the whole world? The pharmaceutical industry would suffer the same fate as the music, movie, and auto industries (China currently makes replicas of several cars such as VW and Smart). I would even argue that medical innovations are more important than those in other fields and require even more protection.
What do you think?
Subject: Tell Novartis to stop blocking inexpensive medicines for poor people
Drug company Novartis is challenging India's Patent law to prevent cheaper generic versions of its drugs being sold in India. If they win, this will threaten India's ability to produce affordable generic drugs, including HIV medicines, which are benefiting millions of people in India and other developing countries.
This could seriously impede poor people obtaining cheaper medicines and is against an international agreement that declares that developing countries can produce and import cheaper versions of medicines in the interests of public health.
Millions of poor people depend on these life-saving medicines.Please contact Novartis today and tell them to drop their lawsuit!
http://act.oxfamamerica.org/campaign/novartis?rk=h1ApEen18EsFW
My response:
1. Novartis is not doing anything illegal. They're simply appealing a previous court decision. The right to appeal is an important part of most judicial systems, and the drug company should not be denied this right. If their claim has no merit the Indian court will simply uphold the previous decision.
2. I think it's a bit pretentious to dictate the appropriate way for Indian courts to interpret and/or amend their own laws from half a world away. Establishing and enforcing effective and equitable intellectual property laws is at least as important to the future of a developing economy as access to inexpensive drugs.
3. Patent laws exist to encourage innovation and protect inventors' rights. If Indian generic drug makers were allowed to compete with Novartis, what would prevent them from selling these drugs outside of India - to the whole world? The pharmaceutical industry would suffer the same fate as the music, movie, and auto industries (China currently makes replicas of several cars such as VW and Smart). I would even argue that medical innovations are more important than those in other fields and require even more protection.
What do you think?
posted by Zak at
11:27 AM
2 Comments:
Additionally, the reason these drugs are so cheap is they are simply reverse-engineered (read:stolen) from the original brands and often not very accurately. Production conditions also leave "room for improvement" - ingredients are literally mixed in a giant bowl by had with no regard to sanitary norms. There is no adequate quality control, where during production of the Name Brand drug huge quantities of final product are being discarded due to not meeting strict specifications. Needless to say, one can only imagine side effect of such cheap, imperfect generic drug. My wife is in the industry and deals with these issues first hand.
Aleksey
By
babochkov, at 3:50 PM
as suspected-- biased reporting... where is my response email with all the excellent responses to your propaganda?!??!!? what happened to fair and balanced?!
By
Anonymous, at 3:08 PM
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