This is my response to this article titled Drug giant GlaxoSmithKline pledges cheap medicine for world's poor
Whatever their real goals (humane or just a calculated ploy), a few observations below:
The US government already spends around $30 billion a year (for basic bio-medical research) via the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This is a taxpayer subsidy to pharmaceutical companies. The pharmaceutical companies always make it sound like it's all their investment and all their hard work, but $30 billion a year is from us public (the market itself could never generate enough money for research). So how come they still have so many strong patents ? The public has a right (it's not a lousy favor from someone) to the benefits of such funding in the form of cheaper drugs and limitations on patents. The government can even increase the funding via NIH and allow the public to gain even more control over the benefits accrued.
It's not clear to me who "patent pooling" is going to benefit and if there are better options such as allowing developing countries to manufacture generics. If "patent pooling" just means just sharing patents among competing pharmaceutical companies, then it may reduce wasteful duplication of research effort by the companies, but will it ultimately reduce the cost of the drugs the same way generics do?
If you read carefully, the article says that this might actually undermine the generics market. From the article -- "Campaigners privately say the move is remarkable, although they worry that it may undermine the generics industry which currently supplies the cheapest drugs in poor countries." and "Campaigners gave a cautious welcome to GSK's strategy. But Oxfam and Médecins Sans Frontières both said the company should go further and include HIV drugs in the patent pool, and warned that generics companies have always been able to offer lower prices than big pharma, because of their lower production costs."
The pharmaceutical companies will readily outsource "discovery" efforts to Bangalore etc. and reap the benefits of outsourcing, but when it comes to allowing Indian companies to manufacture generics cheaply, they get a heart-attack because it cuts into their profits (the fact that it saves lives is not a priority). The US will generally not purchase generic drugs from other countries where it is cheaper to produce (under the influence of the pharmaceutical industry, of course), and organizations like the WTO etc. will prevent companies in other countries (the standard example is CIPLA/Tamiflu, but there are probably many such examples) from manufacturing generics
In general, we should look at the solutions being provided by pharmaceutical companies (no doubt due to public pressure) and consider their possible benefits, but also stop to consider: "Are there better solutions?"
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