‘Thailand’s Patent Damage’

Roger Bate relies on distortions and common myths about compulsory licenses the same way the inebriated use lampposts: more for support than illumination [Oped, “Thailand’s Patent Damage,” April 3, 2007].

In issuing compulsory licenses, Thailand is heeding the advice of institutions like the World Bank — hardly “radical members of the antipatent movement” as Mr. Bate claims — to utilize World Trade Organization rules to produce less-expensive generic medicines in order to provide HIV/AIDS treatment to the estimated 200,000 people in the country who need it.

And in Thailand and other parts of the developing world, the next crisis in AIDS treatment is already here, with second-line anti-retroviral medicines costing between five and 22 times the amount of first-line treatments.

The WTO rules are extremely clear that countries can determine the grounds for issuing a compulsory license. It is a common misunderstanding perpetuated by opeds like Mr. Bate’s that it is “patent busting.”

In fact, America has issued five since June 2006 on everything from satellite TV technology to medical devices.

The choice is simple: either encourage the use of flexibilities built into international trade agreements or let millions of people die because they can not afford life-saving medicines.

For Mr. Bate, “hope remains” if “American interests stand their ground.” As clinicians, my colleagues and I see hope when lives are saved because patients have access to medicines.

DAVID WILSON
Medical coordinator
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontieres
Thailand Mission, Bangkok

Mr. Bate’s reply:

Doctors Without Borders/MSF is playing with words and seems fixated on busting patents — issuing a compulsory license breaks the patent holder’s right to monopoly privileges that a patent provides and on which research and development depends.

Without evidence that compulsory licensing actually improves access to quality drugs, the international community tentatively supports the use of compulsory licensing, but primarily for emergencies, and not for routine conditions such as heart disease.

Drug access is driven by multiple factors, such as medical infrastructure and drug delivery systems, and MSF is misleading readers by claiming that it is primarily down to breaking patents and lowering drug prices.

Indeed, a key reason that more expensive secondary therapy is now required by Thai patients is because of the prior use of poor quality drugs, which MSF promoted. MSF has good doctors in the field, but their policy prescriptions are very poor.