The Cure that Costs… Too Little?
A good editorial in the Washington Post in favor of changing intellectual property policies to improve access to medicine for poor countries:
Little by little, the world is coming around to two self-evidently good proposals to improve global health. But there’s a third, equally great proposal to which nobody pays attention… Oddly, the two proposals with momentum are the ones that cost a lot. The first is designed to stimulate production of vaccines for diseases such as polio, yellow fever and hepatitis B… The second proposal is about drugs that don’t exist yet — for example, a malaria vaccine.
…So there’s an appetite to spend taxpayers’ money on buying existing vaccines and on a “pull mechanism” for new ones. But there’s a third challenge in this medical battlefield: How to make drugs that have been invented for rich countries available in the poor world.
