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« Patent "Reform" May Happen This Year, After All | Main | Follow-on Biologics Data Exclusivity Debate Scorecard - Part II »

October 28, 2009

Comments

Why is anyone surprised at the Henry Grabowski's subsidized comments? He played the same role when we fought for Hatch-Waxman. He was wrong then and he is wrong today. He is entitled to his opinion that should be respected but he is not entitled to play the usual Pharma game of using his credentials as a screen for Pharma arguments. Now biotech products enjoy virtual perpetual patents...that is correct, perpetual patents. For those who are not keeping track of events, Pharma and Bio are now fully engaged, mostly secretly, in a worldwide anti-generic campaign. In European ports legal transshipments of generic drugs are being seized as "counterfeits" most held in storage for a time and then apologically sent back to the generic company as a "mistake." Why would a counterfeiter use generics that sell, for example, for a dollar when the counterfeiter can exert the same illegal activity to counterfeit a brand name product(which should be and is illegal)? Two-thirds of the people in poor countries are currently and systematically being denied access to generic drugs due to the "Indian Ordinance" supported and promoted by Pharma. Remember,too, that the multinationals kept the price of AIDS drugs at $12-15,000 in the poor nations of the world where 35-plus millions were on the pathway to dying while Pharma block the use of generic clones created in a much simplier combination and regime that would sell for a dollar a day (today: under $100 a year) when the brands could not sell their products in the poor nations? President Bush in his 2003 State of the Union cited that example as the rationale for the world's largest contribution to AIDS treatment in poor nations...yes President Bush. The generic triple remains WHO's first line treatment for AIDS? Now upwards of three million patients are now alive and on affordable generic AIDS medicines.The answer is simple: Pharma companies did not want the western nations where their product from three different companies sold for $15,000 a year, to learn that a simplfied version, one table twice a day, was affordable? A large portion of the high price for AIDS medicines in the United States is financed by the governments, federal and States and in some States is being restrained due to the high cost. It appears that what I used to call the cadre of "academic whores" are back in business.

(FYI: As head of the generic trade association, I initiated and negotiated Hatch-Waxman that opened the market to generics after thirty-five years of failed attempts with the long time opposition supported by these so-called neutral and "fair minded" academics who also failed to disclose that their reserach was not peer-reviewed and paid for by an interested party. It is up to their Universities to put a stop to this nonsense). Bill Haddad

Dear Bill:

Here's another peer-reviewed article you probably won't like:

www.patentdocs.org/2009/10/maybe-hatchwaxman-data-exclusivity-isnt-so-good-for-traditional-drugs-after-all.html

Thanks for the comment.

Dear Bill:

Sorry, I forgot to include the fact that, if everyone agreed on the current 12-year data exclusivity period, it would be a vast improvement on infinity, the current term.

And Congress could always revisit if 12 years turns out to be too much.

Thanks for the comment.

P.S. We don't really do the ad hominem stuff here. It doesn't advance the debate, it is emotional rather than intellectual, and it just annoys people rather than making them think.

The comments to this entry are closed.

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