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Asserting The Primacy of Health Over Patent Rights: A Comparative Study of the Processes that Led to the Use of Compulsory Licensing in T hailand and B razil
Author(s) -
Rosenberg Stephanie T.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
developing world bioethics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.398
H-Index - 27
eISSN - 1471-8847
pISSN - 1471-8731
DOI - 10.1111/dewb.12050
Subject(s) - intellectual property , competition (biology) , government (linguistics) , business , essential medicines , right to health , order (exchange) , health care , access to medicines , public economics , international trade , economic growth , economics , law , finance , political science , ecology , linguistics , philosophy , biology
Since the 1970s, the United States has adopted a trade policy agenda that has forced countries to trade away flexible patent provisions for access to US markets. While pharmaceutical companies have argued that the recognition of patent rights is essential for recovering investments in research and development of pharmaceuticals and incentivizing future innovation, the lack of competition has had damaging consequences for public health, as companies tend to set the prices of treatments beyond the reach of consumers and government programs. T hailand and B razil are bound by law to provide universal access to anti‐retroviral treatment ( ART ) to People Living with HIV / AIDS ( PLWHA ). This has been made possible in part due to the universal health care systems in each country and the countries' local technical and industrial capacities that provide the government with affordable generic medicines. The introduction of stronger intellectual property protection laws however, has limited possibilities for procuring generic medicines and inflated the cost of treatment. Between 2006–2008, T hailand and B razil used compulsory licensing to authorize generic competition against the consent of the pharmaceutical companies in order to guarantee the right to health and ensure the viability of government health budgets. This paper will demonstrate how the interaction between individual / collective action and structural and institutional elements in Thailand and Brazil produced propitious conditions for each country to assert the primacy of health over patent rights.