51–60 of 101 posts
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He specifically said it was in Brazil. Saying 'not to be pedantic' doesn't make it any less so.
I've been taking the "blockbuster drug", Humira/Adalimumab, for more than 10 years. Humira alone is estimated to have generated US$200 billion in profits for a single company. Its history, its legal and commercial maneuvers are appalling and possibly the poster child for what is wrong with the patent system. And how public money originally funds much of the research into these drugs. This year I finally started takin…
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> TITLE 8 SECTION II Article 196. Health is a right of all and a duty of the State and shall be guaranteed by means of social and economic policies aimed at reducing the risk of illness and other hazards and at the universal and equal access to actions and services for its promotion, protection and recovery.[1]
[1]https://www.stf.jus.br/arquivo/cms/legislacaoConstituicao/an...
I followed Lina Kahn (FTC chair) on Twitter before Biden appointed her, and I was kind of blown away that it happened. She had a very clear philosophical opposition to a lot of the way things are done in this country. And I mean, I followed her because I agreed! But my preferences are not mainstream. Amazing to see her slinging rocks at giants from this position.
Maybe it was her surname. This "hipster antitrust" approach is a nice smoke screen big pharma needs. India and other countries already make generics, there is no need to wait several years for US manufacturers. FTC is just a road block that prevents cheap medical imports.
Would you mind expanding on that?
At first I thought this was about minor changes to formulations that can be granted new patents, a problem which seems to me to be to be outside the FTC's purview. It looks like the problem is more like out and out fraud: Brand drug manufacturers are responsible for ensuring their patents are properly listed. Yet certain manufacturers have submitted patents for listing in the Orange Book that claim neither the refere…
My take: she has a solid case on this. You build credibility by winning. She hasn't done a good job on that.
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"objectively wrong" no longer exists in politics, if it ever did.
The government isn't capable of doing the work it wants to do and so "good enough" doesn't apply. You can claim that the government was wrong in its pursuit of this case but that doesn't suddenly mean Congress has no work to do. At minimum codifying what makes it inappropriate for the government to take the action it attempted would be valuable. Congress is supposed to clarify if the Executive and Judicial do not agr…
Debatable. Unless you're just referring to the executive branch the government does not have a single goal, and many of the leaders of the government want opposite things.
> Thus "objectively wrong" isn't about which side is right, it is that agreement doesn't exist.
Sure we can agree there. The issue is that there isn't even agreement on whether there's agreement. Kneecapping the government is the meta optimal move for minority parties, they gain nothing from trying to make the government more effective. So even if all the lawmakers secretly agree that congress has work to do, they'll never admit it.
I have to admit I didn't know how the Orange Book worked, so I had to do some research. Do I have this right? "An Orange Book listing shows "approved prescription drugs, related patent and exclusivity information, and therapeutic equivalence evaluations, along with other information." https://www.fda.gov/drugs/news-events-human-drugs/our-perspe... So a pharma company can insert a listing saying that, for a bogus exam…
Not only bogus, but if you get a hit on a scaffold you can combinatorially modify that scaffold and file it with the patent. This effectively blocks the small permutation space around the drug from further investigation or development. There's lot of promising science that can't be done because incumbents are so adversarial about patent space for structures they don't even care about. To make matters worse, patent da…
> The company which applies for a patent makes a general claim for the usage of the molecule without revealing to their competitors the exact molecule for which they are declaring a useful application
Isn't that against the very point of a patent? That you reveal (make "patent") what you're doing to the public so that the art isn't lost, in exchange for some form of commercial protection? How in the world is this legal?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like the sentiment - but this is probably the "just do it already". Real warnings happen behind closed doors - this is probably a "We're going to create a PR nightmare if you don't fix your act, this is the first step on the public being very very mad. And we'd rather like to avoid going to court against your super-lawyers."
Just revoke a corporate charter or two of the most frequent abusers. That will certainly get the attention of those that remain. Then you can warn them that they're next if they don't change tack pronto. Big companies are next to invulnerable when you treat them using the same playbook as you would a jaywalker or a person the runs a red light. They love their court cases because they have lawyers on retention and it…