04.11.10
Gemini version available ♊︎Quote of the Day: “Pharma patents are not about drug discovery, but about jacking up the prices on drugs.”
Summary: What India is teaching us about the impact of patents that increase wealth (in the West) rather than reduce mortality as a matter of priority
IT HAS been a long time since we last explained the fundamental problem with pharmaceutical patents [1, 2]. The following item from the news (some context here) led to the following remark from Mike Masnick:
However, Jamie Love points us to the news of a new report that found that the Indian patent office has gone against this law and issued such patents quite frequently and, no surprise, the main recipients are among the world’s largest pharma companies, including Pfizer, Novartis and Eli Lilly. Is it any wonder that they’ve all been pushing to dump sections 3(d) and (e) all along? Remember, pharma patents are not about drug discovery, but about jacking up the prices on drugs.
When it comes to pharmaceutical patents, life is at stake (there is Novartis for example [1, 2, 3, 4]). A lot of disinformation is being spread to teach the public that there is no better way. █