Johnson and Johnson attempts to sacrifice millions of lives by restricting life saving tuberculosis drug
Barely Contained Rage: An Open Letter to Johnson & Johnson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMhgw5SW0h4
Tell Johnson and Johnson that evergreening their patent on bedaquiline, which will deny millions of people access to live-saving treatment, is a violation of...
"Multidrug resistant tuberculosis is a growing threat, and bedaquiline is essential to curing it. Generic bedaquiline will drive down the cost of the drug by over 60%, allowing far more communities to access and distribute treatment. Evergreening the patent will cost so many lives over the next four years, which Johnson & Johnson knows. They must drop their efforts to enforce the secondary patents."
"Tell Johnson and Johnson that evergreening their patent on bedaquiline, which will deny millions of people access to live-saving treatment, is a violation of their corporate credo: https://secure.ethicspoint.com/domain... Tell them on twitter: https://twitter.com/JNJNews and https://twitter.com/JNJGlobalHealth Tell them on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jnj/ Tell them on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jnj/?hl=en And tell them wherever else you can. Tell your friends. Tell your family. Tell the Internet. This must not be allowed to happen.
Big thanks to TB expert Dr. Carole Mitnick and MSF's Christophe Perrin for helping me to understand the complexities of drug patents!"
"Tell massive heartless corporation to not make every single penny possible!"
Corporation: "We must say with a heavy heart that we've lost our communications department. They all died of hysterical laughter after receiving a request to put people over profit."
They had 20 years. At some point, you stop asking corporations to do things and start making them do things. 20 years seems like a reasonable place to start.
What's truly comical is that all the people in charge of those corporations probably took ethics classes in business school.
"Tell massive heartless corporation to not make every single penny possible!"
You’re right that corporate incentives are completely messed up, but when something like this generates negative press it hurts their brand and potentially their bottom line down the road as a result. If they do reverse course it certainly won’t be out of the goodness of their hearts.
This is why I am pro-public healthcare. A market isn’t a free market if I die when I don’t buy your product.
So first of all, fuck Johnson and Johnson. Drug patents are weird because there's an inherent contradiction, but that in no way absolves the corporation.
The idea of a patent is something reasonable. If you discover a new process or invent a new product, you should get to uniquely benefit from it. You put in the hard work to research and develop it after all. Others shouldn't be able to just read what you did and go do it without having to do the work.
But what if that new product is a new medicine? Or a process to make an existing medicine much more quickly? Leaving you as the sole producer means you can charge really high prices for something lifesaving. And if you run low on stock, too bad to the buyers. That's absurdly immoral and wrong. If someone needs a medication, they should be able to affordably access it. This goes against the idea of a patent.
No matter what we do, the medicine should remain affordable and widely accessible. The question should be "How do we reward the inventor while maintaining the accessibility and affordability?", not "How do we make this accessible and affordable while maintaining the inventor's exclusivity?". Johnson and Johnson is asking the latter question, which is why they can go fuck themselves. As a society we need to ask the former question. How do we reward research and innovation without allowing people to die?
The patent process just doesn't work for this, and we need a new system. The government should be responsible for the distribution of the medicine, and it can maintain a high supply while still rewarding the inventor. Give the inventor preferential treatment, so that their supply is bought and used first. Any demand that they can't meet is filled by other manufacturers, who are free to produce the drug. Maintain this for 5 years before removing the exclusivity status. The idea needs some more refinement of course, but the general idea I think is a good one. By giving the inventor preferential treatment, you can still reward them while keeping the product cheap and plentiful.
Well, in their defense what is their Chief Death Officer supposed to do? He already got neutered in the talc settlement so he had to come up with a new way to cause more deaths.
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Corporations gonna corporate. Anyone getting mad at this is missing the lesson. It's like telling a lion on the Serengeti not to eat that gazelle. As long as you have privately owned profit driven businesses involved in medicine their goal is going to be income, not saving lives. Only solution is publicly funded research, and selling at a reasonable cost to not undercut the private companies, which would be just as unethical as the private companies price gouging.
Don't think private medicine companies are such a bad thing - there can only be so much research that is publicly funded and we can potentially miss out on some life saving drug not getting developed.
Imo a better solution would be decreasing the patent age so that the companies have only a small window to generate profit, after which the drugs would go into public domain. 20 years is way too long to profit of a discovery
Johnson and Johnson? Damn, I knew they were assholes but they should stick to being FBI guys.
