E-drug: Attaran/Gillespie-White and PhRMA patent surveys (cont'd)
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[Another interesting comparison of Amir Attaran's arguments on
drug patents in sub-Saharan Africa. In defence of Harvard School of
Public Health, Dr Attaran is not attached to their institute, but to
the Center for International Development of Harvard University.
However, somebody from HSPH may want to react, as also their
name may be compromised by this kind of 'research' by other
Harvard institutes. In addition, there is an interesting proposal for
future research. Copied from Ip-health. Thanks. HH]
I have been following the debate over Amir's paper in the
background, as a reader on this list, but I have to say the whole
thing really is hard to take. As I understand it, the thrust of Amir's
research (as he interprets it) is that patents don't keep people in
sub-Saharan Africa from getting AIDS drugs, but poverty does. This
seems comparable to finding that eating large amounts of vanilla ice
cream doesn't cause people to gain weight, because many
marathon runners eat gallons of the stuff, and are quite thin. I have
much less respect for Harvard's School of Public Health than I used
to.
Perhaps someone on this list can tell me why no one at the Harvard
School of Public Health (or anywhere else, to my knowledge) has
done a study that examines whether patents are the most efficient
way to support pharmaceutical research. Given the incentives that
the patent system creates for falsifying results, secrecy, and
researching copycat drugs of little value, there is a serious basis for
questioning its efficiency relative to other methods. In addition, the
enormous inefficiencies associated with the monopoly rents
stemming from patent protection (legal fees, lobbying expenses,
advertising and promotion campaigns, bribes etc.) provides a
second major reason for questioning the relative efficiency of the
patent system. And there is also the inevitable gray markets
resulting from the existence of monopoly drug pricing, which can
lead to the spread of drugs of questionable quality which are
provided without proper supervision.
Is there any obvious reason why Harvard School of Public Health is
not researching this issue? For that matter, I would think that
PHARMA would want to fund a study along these lines which
examined the efficiency of patent supported research relative to say
... NIH supported research. For $100,000 to $200,000, or just one
fiftieth of one percent of what PHARMA's members spend to
research a new drug (they claim it costs them $500 million) they
could probably produce a very good study on this topic. Does
anyone know any reason why no one seems to have undertaken
such a study?
Dean Baker
Center for Economic and Policy Research
e-mail: dean.baker@worldnet.att.net