Posts Tagged: "un"

The UN has Better Things to do Than Destroy Innovation

The UN Panel unfortunately squandered its 9-month gestation period. It stuffed into one repository every long-discarded remnant of anti-patent and pro-price-control schemes buried in IP’s historic landfill. Its Report expressly recommended directives to carry out each of them, demonstrating their counterproductive unworkability. After cramming each policy device into a trashcan of unworkable IP stratagems, they waited until the last minute and dumped it on the doorstep of the UN General Assembly. As University of Chicago Economist Tomas Philips concisely explains in this weekend’s WSJ, the UNHLP’s recommendations are nonsensical.

UN Secretary General’s Panel on Access to Medicines Reports: Government Knows Best

Delayed for months beyond its expected issue date the Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Access to Medicine’s report emerged yesterday. Apparently the panelists scrambled to better disguise their predetermined agenda behind reams of soothing rhetoric. While lip service is given to the unimagined advances in medicine under the current industry led drug development system, that’s quickly discarded under the pretext of providing better access to health care for the world’s poorest citizens through a system run by international bureaucracy. These recommendations are largely directed at the US life science industry. Luckily, one panel member provides an effective rebuttal to this approach but unless his message is repeated many public officials, media outlets and the general public could come to accept that a government run system would be “more fair.”

Counterfeit Medicines and the Role of IP in Patient Safety

Given the devastating impact of counterfeit medicines on patients and the importance of intellectual property protection in combating pharmaceutical counterfeiting, it is troubling that the UN High Level Panel seems poised to prevent a series of recommendations that will undermine public health under the guise of enhancing access. Without the assurance of quality medicines, access is meaningless. Moreover, while falsely presenting intellectual property rights as the primary obstacle to global health care, the High Level Panel downplays a host of other factors that prevent developing country patients from getting the drugs they need: inadequate medical infrastructure, insufficient political will, a shortage of clinical trials in nations where neglected diseases are endemic, poverty, and insufficient market incentives.

UN Access to Medicines Panel Undermines Bayh-Dole 

We cannot know what biological killer will next emerge, when it will be born and where globalization’s winds will take it. But we do know that choking-off future private investment in future healthcare needs is foolhardy. And that is what will happen if the UN sanctions this finding. Investment hates uncertainty. And innovation dies without investment. The underdeveloped countries the Panel may seek to protect are often those that suffer first from epidemics like HIV /Aids, Ebola; and Zika. They will suffer first when the next biological scourge begins taking lives.

The UN’s Misguided Focus on Patents as the Cause of Drug Shortages

Improving access to needed medicines for those suffering the ravages of disease in developing countries is a serious issue. There are many factors contributing to the problem including poor transportation systems, lack of available health care and education, endemic poverty, trade barriers, systematic corruption and, of course, the cost of drugs. Yet the U.N. Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines is focusing on the patent system as the source of the problem. The report is due next month. The Panel is to “address the policy incoherence between intellectual property laws and access to medicines.”