Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Patent rights key to ensuring access to medication; Trib Live, 10/24/16

Robert A. Freeman, Trib Live; Patent rights key to ensuring access to medication:
" A United Nations panel recently released disastrous policy recommendations designed to increase access to medicines in developing countries. The panel ignored obvious solutions.
Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon originally tasked the UN High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines with remedying the “policy incoherence” between intellectual property rights and drug access. The panel predictably — and wrongly — viewed IP protections as a barrier to access rather than a bridge to medical innovation.
Undermining IP rights will not help patients in developing countries access medicines.
A 2016 Foreign Affairs study sought to determine whether strong patent protections increase the prices of drugs to developing countries. It found that patents were not key drivers of higher expenditures."

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