E-drug: Attaran/Gillespie-White and PhRMA patent surveys (cont'd)
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I don't understand how a quality journal as JAMA could accept
Amir's paper. In my view, it has (at least) 3 internal inconsistencies:
1. The data are only on patents. For access, it is only said that
"antiretroviral treatment chich is uniformly poor across Africa". No
data is given. So he does not have the right to speak of a
correlation. Try to write that in a university statistics dissertation!
2. It is said that "a variety of de facto barriers are responsible for
impeding access to antiretroviral treatment", and at the same time
the authors process a one factor (patents) analysis without
justification of why they do so. In fact, the different factors are
inter-related. The first of the de facto factors listed is "insufficient
finances to puchase relatively costly antiretroviral drugs". It is well
proven by a huge amount of literature that patents do have effects
on prices, so patents do have indirect effect on access!
3. When examing strategies to improve access, it is said that "A
comprehensive treatment access plan for Africa must overcome
these non-patent barriers..." So we expect an examination of
non-patent barriers. But ... surprise, the question of patents is
central in analysing sourcing drugs strategies: competition between
generics and brand-name drugs, (...) and compulsory licencing. Can
we believe that these issues are not related to patents? So, this
paper says all things in the opposite way (as we say in french "tout
et son contraire").
I am quite surprised this paper passed successfully any serious
referee barrier! The original survey on patents of antiretroviral drugs
is useful, but the rest has nothing to do with it.
Jerome Dumoulin
I.R.E.P.D.
F 38040 Grenoble CEDEX 9
France
Tel.: (+33) 476 8254 50
Fax: (+33) 476 8259 89
E-mail: jerome.dumoulin@upmf-grenoble.fr
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