Some commercial products and practices are directly linked to avoidable ill health, planetary damage, and social and health inequity. Large transnational corporations are especially to blame.
The pharma industry warned that if proposed new prescription price guidelines go ahead, drug launches would be delayed and ‘Canadian patients will be deprived of potentially life-saving new medicines.’
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The pharma industry claims lower prescription drug prices will mean less access to new medication for Canadians. It’s an old threat that pits profits against patients’ rights to affordable drugs.
Drug patents don’t necessarily spur companies to innovate so much as restrict access to their IP.
Andrii Zastrozhnov/iStock via Getty Images Plus
The Medicines Patent Pool was created to promote public health, facilitating generic licensing for patented drugs that treat diseases predominantly affecting low- and middle-income countries.
COVID-19 patients receive oxygen as they lie in their beds in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Machakos, Kenya, in August 2021.
(AP Photo/Brian Inganga)
A major lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic is the need to decolonize transnational governance so that the world is better able to handle both future and current global crises.
OxyContin, an opioid drug heavily marketed by Purdue Pharma, is associated with billions of dollars of health-care costs in Canada related to the opioid crisis.
(AP Photo/Toby Talbot)
The Purdue Pharma settlement is paltry compared to costs of the opioid crisis. Without major changes to pharma industry regulation, there is little reason to think a similar crisis won’t occur again.
Global Justice campaigners in London stand by fake coffins to highlight global COVID-19 deaths. If pharma companies waived intellectual property rights, it would be easier for low- and middle-income countries to access COVID-19 vaccines.
(AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
Ronald Labonte, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa
Waiving patent rights on COVID-19 vaccines and drugs is still crucial to ensure access globally, but the waiver on the table at the June World Trade Organization meeting doesn’t do the job.
Drug repurposing can redeem failed treatments and squeeze out new uses from others. But many pharmaceutical companies are hesitant to retool existing drugs without a high return on investment.
Changes to the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board regulations, which are intended to help lower drug costs in Canada, were originally scheduled to take effect in July 2020.
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Changes to Canada’s Patented Medicine Prices Review Board regulations have been postponed for a fourth time in two years as Canadians continue to pay some of the highest drug prices in the world.
Generic drug names are assigned at the global level by the World Health Organization in conjunction with national naming authorities.
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Generic drug names are often long, but they can tell doctors what type of medicine it is and how it works. But it’s brand names that appear first and most prominently in Health Canada materials.
The level of evidence for withdrawing a drug does not appear to affect the pharma company’s response.
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When drugs are taken off the market because they are either unsafe or don’t work, do pharma companies admit that there are problems? Or do they deny the evidence?
With the World Trade Organization’s 12th Ministerial Conference – arguably its most important ever – happening next week, attempts to keep it ‘on life support’ may be counterproductive.
A new study suggests the market alone will not deter or punish pharmaceutical companies whose products turn out to have adverse effects after they have been approved.
Bacteria that are resistant to every available antibiotic in the U.S. already exist.
Rodolfo Parulan Jr/Moment via Getty Images
Each dose of Pfizer has a long and complex path involving mixing, storage at temperatures colder than the South Pole and specific protocols that must be followed before it becomes a jab.
The COVID pandemic is giving drug companies an opportunity to reset their image. So how did they get so big and their credibility sink so low?
The first Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine dose in Canada sits ready for use at The Michener Institute in Toronto in mid-December 2020, less than a year from when the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn
If Big Pharma wants to achieve the ultimate image makeover, it must capitalize on the current public good will about its COVID-19 vaccines by prioritizing socially responsible practices.
Until the late 19th century, patenting medicines was considered by some as controversial and even unethical.
S. Vannini/De Agostini Editorial via Getty Images
The pharmaceutical industry overall has been deeply opposed to waiving COVID-19 vaccine patents, but a historian of the industry explains that drug companies once opposed patents altogether.
A woman who said she’s a medical worker who works directly with COVID-19 patients is stopped by police outside of the public Rebagliati Hospital in Lima, Peru, in February 2021. She complained that some people getting vaccinated don’t work directly with COVID-19 patients.
(AP Photo/Martin Mejia)
A vaccination queue-jumping scandal in Peru has caused a massive uproar in the South American country. It could also be a wake-up call for all nations.
Ilan Noy, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington and Ami Neuberger, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
As the eradication of polio and the successful rollout of AIDS treatments have shown in the past, global cooperation in the face of COVID-19 is possible.
Professor of Bioethics & Medicine, Sydney Health Ethics, Haematologist/BMT Physician, Royal North Shore Hospital and Director, Praxis Australia, University of Sydney
Ken Harvey
Health activist, Medreach Pty Ltd., Bond University