Posted by Michael Wonder on 20 Sep 2016
Economic nonsense from the U.N. on drugs
16 September 2016 - Blowing up the patent system will make it harder, not easier, for the global poor to get medicines.
United Nations Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon last year convened a high-level panel on “Access to Medicines,” charging it with remedying “the policy incoherence between the justifiable rights of inventors and public health.” In plain English, the panel’s job was to suggest ways to bring more medicines to the developing world.
The Wall Street Journal is not a fan of the policy; which it claims will have the opposite effect. It boils down to an attack on intellectual-property laws. Among other recommendations, panelists urged governments world-wide to restrict which medicines can be patented; codify procedures for breaking companies’ patents; and subject trade agreements between sovereign countries to bureaucratic “public health impact assessments.”
