The Pharmaceutical Industry Rises Up Against the Proposed EU Patent Reforms during Emergency Situations | Il Fatto Quotidiano

Putting the collective interest before profits? Never be. The pharmaceutical industry rises up against the hypothesis of reform of the pharmaceutical market being worked on by the European Commission. A reform that, of course, only concerns emergency situations like the one that materialized on the occasion of the pandemic. Brussels envisages a system to make it easier to share key medicines and introduce vaccines a compulsory licensethat is to say the possibility for the EU to use a patented invention (such as drugs and vaccines) too without the owner’s consentand in any case upon payment of a fee. Vade retro Satana! was the immediate reaction of pharmaceutical companies according to which this measure is the result of a “ideological and anti-industrial approach” on intellectual property, thus putting “investments” and “innovation” on the continent at risk.

According to the drug giants gathered in the Aeif (European Pharmaceutical Industry Association) a system at EU level for the patent extension on medicines and phytosanitary products “is essential for investment”, but “the Commission’s proposal for a mandatory EU authorization, which could be used to repeal the intellectual property rights of innovators, raises concerns and seems to ignore the lessons learned from the response to the Covid pandemic”. “The EU Commission’s proposal to introduce a new compulsory license tool to use a patented drug without the consent of the patent holder in case of emergencies frustrates investments in research and puts the health of citizens in Europe at risk”, thunders from the Italy the president of Farmindustria, Marcello Cattani.

Evidently there is still work to be done on memory treatments. Much of the funds for the development and production of anti-Covid vaccines have in fact come in the form of public funding. paid in various forms. BioNtech alone had received from Berlin just under 400 million euros. Pfizer obtained over 2 billion from the US and the EU, Moderna the same, Astrazeneca about one billion. In essence, the public took charge of funding the riskiest part of the vaccine creation process, the initial one where the possibility of failing and losing money is greatest. Pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer have been buried out of billions in profits thanks to virus drugs sold at prices 10 or 20 times higher than the cost of production. After all, in general, pharmaceutical companies don’t really like investing in the development of preventive solutions against potential threats. It is unprofitable and threatens to eliminate possible future sources of profit.

The compulsory license, explains Brussels, can still be requested only after an alert is triggered or a state of crisis at the community level. And it would thus complement the common emergency measures already envisaged for health with the responsible Hera authority, or those contained in the Chips Act for the shortage of semiconductors and in the RePowerEu for energy shocks. The commission’s proposal will have to be approved first by the European Parliament and then by the governments of the member countries. Pharmaceutical companies then have time to develop and deploy their traditional and powerful lobbying action.