this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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"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!"

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[–] solstice@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Corporations gonna corporate. Anyone getting mad at this is missing the lesson. It's like telling a lion on the Serengeti not to eat that gazelle. As long as you have privately owned profit driven businesses involved in medicine their goal is going to be income, not saving lives. Only solution is publicly funded research, and selling at a reasonable cost to not undercut the private companies, which would be just as unethical as the private companies price gouging.

[–] Fritee@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Don't think private medicine companies are such a bad thing - there can only be so much research that is publicly funded and we can potentially miss out on some life saving drug not getting developed.

Imo a better solution would be decreasing the patent age so that the companies have only a small window to generate profit, after which the drugs would go into public domain. 20 years is way too long to profit of a discovery

[–] starlinguk@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago

This drug got a huge amount of public funding.

[–] assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

At its core, there's two competing ideas here, and neither are inherent corporate greed (although that's certainly the motivation for JJ).

  1. Whoever discovers or creates something brand new should have the exclusive rights to create/use that for X time. This rewards and encourages innovation, and companies recoup the cost of research.

  2. A medical discovery which helps people should be as widely and readily accessible as possible.

The second has to be achieved no matter what, so the question is how you provide a profit motive for discovery while not making the product exclusive. What if instead of exclusivity, the creator received preferential treatment? The government buys X of the new drug, and the creator can supply that full amount -- if they can't though, then others can fill the gap. This needs more consideration, but the basic idea is that the creator gets to sell their supply first, and others can sell after that.

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 5 points 1 year ago

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

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Whoever discovers or creates something brand new should have the exclusive rights to create/use that for X time. This rewards and encourages innovation, and companies recoup the cost of research.

I think it's important to distinguish the underlying goal from the mechanism used to achieve this. (In software user story development we distinguish between the "so that" and the "I want".)

So I would restate this as:

Whoever discovers or creates something brand new should have the ability to profit substantially from their discovery or invention.

This does not need to be via a period of exclusivity. Exclusivity is one way of doing it, and it's a pretty good one, but jumping ahead to that shortcuts the ability to come up with other possibilities.

[–] assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Agreed. There's other ways to accomplish this, and that should be the case for medicines.

[–] solstice@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Well yeah that's why I said not to undercut private companies, which would be uncompetitive and force them out of business. Mix of public and private.

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