Barely Contained Rage: An Open Letter to Johnson & Johnson
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Tell Johnson and Johnson that evergreening their patent on bedaquiline, which will deny millions of people access to live-saving treatment, is a violation of...

“Multidrug resistant tuberculosis is a growing threat, and bedaquiline is essential to curing it. Generic bedaquiline will drive down the cost of the drug by over 60%, allowing far more communities to access and distribute treatment. Evergreening the patent will cost so many lives over the next four years, which Johnson & Johnson knows. They must drop their efforts to enforce the secondary patents.”

"Tell Johnson and Johnson that evergreening their patent on bedaquiline, which will deny millions of people access to live-saving treatment, is a violation of their corporate credo: https://secure.ethicspoint.com/domain… Tell them on twitter: https://twitter.com/JNJNews and https://twitter.com/JNJGlobalHealth Tell them on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jnj/ Tell them on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jnj/?hl=en And tell them wherever else you can. Tell your friends. Tell your family. Tell the Internet. This must not be allowed to happen.

Big thanks to TB expert Dr. Carole Mitnick and MSF’s Christophe Perrin for helping me to understand the complexities of drug patents!"

  • ZagorathEnglish
    3·
    11 months ago

    Whoever discovers or creates something brand new should have the exclusive rights to create/use that for X time. This rewards and encourages innovation, and companies recoup the cost of research.

    I think it’s important to distinguish the underlying goal from the mechanism used to achieve this. (In software user story development we distinguish between the “so that” and the “I want”.)

    So I would restate this as:

    Whoever discovers or creates something brand new should have the ability to profit substantially from their discovery or invention.

    This does not need to be via a period of exclusivity. Exclusivity is one way of doing it, and it’s a pretty good one, but jumping ahead to that shortcuts the ability to come up with other possibilities.