How Big Pharma Weaponizes Patents
First, do no harm to the shareholders.
An interview with Tahir Amin
Tahir Amin, a founder and executive director of the Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (I-MAK), spoke with our associate editor Jon Shaffer about the patent games that pharma companies plays, why “innovation” is propaganda, and whether we can escape the financialization of everything hell we’re in.
The Magic Word Pharma Uses to Charge Whatever They Want
What makes me really angry is how the pharmaceutical industry uses tools like patents to prolong complete monopolies and drive profits. They use every trick in the intellectual property system book to gain extra monopoly, extra power, so that they can keep prices exorbitantly high.
Innovation is a propaganda term to get justification for any economic policy that largely benefits those who have the wealth and power rather than actually benefiting the public.
I used to be an intellectual property lawyer for corporations. So I understand the business, I understand the arguments that companies make: if we didn't have intellectual property, we wouldn't invest, we wouldn't have R&D, we wouldn't have that buzzword innovation.
Innovation is a propaganda term to get justification for any economic policy that largely benefits those who have the wealth and power rather than actually benefiting the public. That is why the longer companies hold the knowledge the more difficult it becomes to get the competition necessary to get drugs to people quickly and affordably.
One of my big pet peeves is how the industry always hides behind that the "I" word: “innovation.” The magical idea that we will have innovation, we will have new drugs and all that stuff because of strict patent protections. Well, most of those patents that are filed after FDA approval, they're not for things that are inventive. I don't like to use the word innovation. It’s a sham.
It ends up meaning a million things but yet has no particular meaning. It is language used as economic propaganda, which serves a few but doesn't serve the many.
How Patents Are Weaponized
Most of the patents on blockbuster drugs are filed after they’ve been FDA approved. And that to me is a very stark piece of information because it goes to show that this idea that "Oh well, we need patents to do the R&D" is a lie.
Ok, let’s pretend that on face value it’s a valid argument, that having a patent gives some guarantee of income and protects them. But then what happens next? This is where you've got this new business model where the patents have been transformed into weapons to keep competition at bay.
Because at the end of the day, if you are a CEO of pharmaceutical company, the longer you hold onto a blockbuster, the more your revenue, the more your shareholders are happy, the more the Wall Street analysts are happy, the more value you're creating for your company, the more your market cap goes up, the more your CEO salary increases because bonuses are tied to stock prices.
So it's all driven by what some academics are called the financialization of the pharmaceutical industry.
Why the Wealthy Get a COVID-19 Vaccine and the Impoverished Don’t
Pharmaceutical companies are able to monopolize knowledge through the patent system, through trade secrets, through various other intellectual property mechanisms, and then hold onto that knowledge for as long as possible in order to charge whatever price they like in order to control markets, in order to control who can actually supply those medicines and drugs.
Moderna and Pfizer had developed these mRNA vaccines. You also had AstraZeneca which had a vaccine which is more traditional virus-based vaccine. With the mRNA, these were new technologies. Moderna and Pfizer were just not willing to share the technology so that other producers around the world, other manufacturers that could have potentially been capable. They didn't want to share it, they wanted to control the supply.
You can see the power at play here. It's not a multilateral system. It's actually a neo-colonial system.
Late last year, we showed that most mRNA doses were going to wealthy countries. The amount of mRNA vaccines that had gone to the low and middle income countries were far less. And even today, low income populations have just not been vaccinated. AstraZeneca, to its credit, did eventually share some of that technology and spread it to different manufacturers around the world.
So India and South Africa said, "Well, we need some kind of waiver of intellectual property that we could use to produce these things ourselves, whether it be ventilators, vaccines, medicines and what have you." It took 18 months until just June or July this year, 18 months later after much blocking by the European Union to get the “waiver” – a very limited version of what they call a World Trade Organization TRIPS (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property) Waiver.
So it took us 18 months to get there and we’re still no better off. This agreement is only limited to the vaccines, not therapeutics, not diagnostics, which is what India and South Africa originally wanted. Trade secrets aren't included in that. These are essential if you're going to make vaccines. That's a big part of vaccine manufacturing. So in a way, the TRIPS waiver decision claimed success when it really was not.
And I have to hold the countries of the lower middle income countries that signed onto this responsible too because at the end of the day, they knew this was not going to work for them and yet hey played the game. No deal would've been a better deal.
So you can see the power at play here. It's not a multilateral system. It's actually a neo-colonial system.
Is There Any Way Out?
I think we need to decentralize production and we cannot have intellectual property rights being a barrier.
I think what we're starting to see the beginnings of that. I mean South Africa is starting to produce mRNA vaccine. It's got its battles, it's got its hurdles, it's not going to be a clean shot. But I think that thinking where they're collaborating with other hubs in different regions where they're trying to actually do their own local production or build their own capacity, I think that's what is required, what's needed in our political climate.
The fact is that we used to depend on India as a pharmacy of the world, but it cannot be depended upon anymore. Many people talked about this back in 2010, that we were putting eggs too much in one basket because India's policies will change and they have. The generic companies have changed, they all signed agreements and now they do these voluntary licensing mechanisms. That's all part of the control mechanism. We need a break out of that. And so I think what people have to realize is what happens here in the United States is affecting other countries. We have to work together to fight back against the financialization of everything.