Must-Read: Medicins sans Frontieres: The Trans-Pacific Partnership: A Threat To Global Health?

…The TPP would lower the standard for patentability of medicines… force TPP governments to grant pharmaceutical companies additional patents for changes… [that] provide no therapeutic benefit… [thus] facilitat[ing] ‘evergreening’ and other forms of abuse of the patent system…. ‘Data exclusivity’… blocks competing firms from using previously generated clinical trial data to gain approval for generic versions of these drugs and vaccines. If pharmaceutical companies have their way, the TPP will block generic producers of biologics from entering the market for at least 12 years…. The Federal Trade Commission finds that no years of data exclusivity were necessary to promote innovation in biologic drugs. Twelve years of data exclusivity is not only unprecedented in any trade agreement, it is not the law in any of the TPP negotiating countries outside of the U.S…. The Obama Administration has actually called for data exclusivity to be reduced to seven years at home, so it is puzzling that the U.S. Trade Representative would be aggressively pushing for these terms in the TPP. These provisions and others currently included in the TPP are at direct odds with the U.S. government’s own long-standing commitments to global health…