Views » December 3, 2005

Their Patents or Your Life

By Joel Bleifuss

Have you heard about that bird flu? The threatened pandemic, should it occur, will kill in a worst-case scenario 150 million people, including 7 million Americans. The resulting mountain of skulls would dwarf those piled up in all the wars of the 20th Century.

Yes, it’s scary stuff. People who research the virus say the question is when, not if, the pandemic will occur. And former Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson describes the avian flu as “a really huge bomb.” The flu kills about 50 percent of the people it infects by attacking the lungs and causing hemorrhage. Healthy young people, those with the strongest immune systems, are most at risk.

To date, only one known drug can ward off death, and that is Tamiflu.

With all of this now widely known, one might expect the Bush administration—having failed to stop the 9/11 hijackers and having just eked through the post-Katrina debacle—to mobilize national resources to ensure that enough Tamiflu was on hand to treat every man, woman and child in the United States.

But it can’t. It doesn’t own the intellectual property rights to Tamiflu. Those rights are controlled by the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche Holding AG, which is only able to produce limited quantities of the medicine.

So when the pandemic hits, should you or yours be among the millions who drown in their own blood, take comfort in the fact that the sacred rights of private property survived.

A hyperbolic rant? Well, if you lived in the poorer regions of the planet and were among the millions of people infected with HIV or living with AIDS, you would be facing a similar situation. The drugs that save the lives of HIV-infected people in wealthy countries weren’t available to most of the 3 million people who died this past year of AIDS. In fact, of the estimated 6 million people in the world with AIDS, only 1 million are on an adequate drug regime—and that does not take into account the millions more who don’t have AIDS but are HIV-positive.

Poor countries have attempted to find ways around drug patents, though at every step of the way they have met fierce resistance from both the pharmaceutical corporations and the Bush administration. Brazil, which was paying 70 percent of the national AIDS budget to buy antiretroviral medicines from three drug companies, had to threaten to violate patent law in order to negotiate a lower price. And India, where companies were breaking international property rights law and manufacturing generic anti-retroviral drugs, shut down such factories as part of its agreement to join the WTO.

Similarly, as the world ponders a potential bird flu pandemic, people are beginning to question just how sacred property rights are. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, speaking at the World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva said, in reference to Roche, that the U.N. should be “making sure that we do not allow intellectual property to get into the way of access of the poor to medication … I wouldn’t want to hear the kind of debate we got into when it came to the HIV anti-retrovirals.” In Washington, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) warned, “Roche is putting their own interests ahead of world health. If they don’t begin to actually license the patent for Tamiflu to dramatically increase worldwide production, I am going to pursue a legislative remedy.”

The chairman of Cipla, the Bombay company whose production of generic anti-AIDS drugs was stopped when India joined the WTO, told the New York Times, “Right or wrong, we’re going to commercialize and make oseltamivir [generic Tamiflu].” And in Tawain, which is not a member of the WTO, the National Health Research Institute has already begun manufacturing a generic Tamiflu.

“It’s lives or patents,” Institute president Cheng-en Wun told the New Zealand Herald. “We value intellectual property, but we have chosen life.”

When will we?

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• Reader Comments

  I completely agree.  Life-saving drugs necessary to treat epidemics should not be withheld by stingy patents. Let them keep their patents for designer drugs that people don’t need to live, but holy crap!?! it’s always profit over human life!  Maybe we need a global insurance company to fund epidemic vaccines?

  Posted by pick of the litter on Dec 2, 2005 at 4:48 PM

  Why should anyone care about property rights when people are dying? We should just take what we want, and let the big companies be damned - we don’t need them anyway. After all, what have they ever done for us, um, well, besides discovering new drugs to cure sickness?

  And while we are at it, why not steal new plasma tv’s? Hell, they are insured anyway. Why worry about technicalities of the law, after all, it is just there to protect the fat cats. . .

  We are entitled to whatever we want and can take. Isn’t this the modern paradigm?

  Posted by wolf on Dec 2, 2005 at 5:47 PM

  Wolf makes a good point.  When we encourage the ‘taking what we please’ mentality, we continually set precedents for lower and lower standards of what is acceptable in terms of upholding the law.  It’s a domino effect of desensitization.  Look at television; we continually rewrite what is and isn’t acceptable to engage in on the idiot box based on what simply creates a sensational reaction.  But, at the same time, this is government obstinance for the sake of following rules that need to be changed and need to have certain statutes built into them, as well as compromises so everyone stands to gain.  When demand comes calling, Roche needs to bend and begin licensing.  People’s lives can’t be spent just because Roche needs to be given the proper due. 

  Taking all humanity out of the quandary for a second, and looking at it through Adam Smith’s eyes, we see nothing but advantage for Roche.  If Roche was thinking logically, and fiscally, they’d see the goldmine opportunity in the current climate.  If they don’t begin to license two things will occur: 1. they won’t make enough profits because people WILL break patent and reproduce it at alarming rates, thereby slashing potential future profits exponentially due to a flooded market.  2., they will also let millions of potential customers die.  Ain’t none of them gonna be buyin any Tamiflu, nor their surviving relatives who will scorn Roche for its lack of action.  Roche only stands to lose profit if they don’t get their act together now and see past the dream of effectively selling millions of doses of Tamilfu to the potential 150 million who’ll get Avian flu. 

  You would think that alone would trigger some movement.  Then again, Swiss banks let millions of people die once before while engaging in shady practices, say, 60 years ago.  Okay okay, that is a lame shot, but history does repeat itself. 

  Roche, get the picture, smarten up.

  Posted by Peterah001 on Dec 2, 2005 at 7:41 PM

  What Bleifuss says is true.  It is wholly immoral that anyone hold back a cure for money, for ANY ailment, just as it is immoral that the only Americans who get good healthcare is its well-employed.  If drug companies, and health care, were “un-privatized,” we could look at ourselves in the mirror without shame.

  Mitch

  Posted by Mitcherino on Dec 2, 2005 at 9:17 PM

  And about upholding the law?  Good laws are created to provide for the common good. And the first right, the right to life must come before the right to intellectual property.  Why not use the right of Eminent Domain to solve this problem?

  Don’t you remember the game we played in high school…imagine you are starving to death, as is your baby.  Is it right or wrong for you to steal a loaf of bread?

  Posted by Mitcherino on Dec 2, 2005 at 9:25 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 42 posts.

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