7 ms·

There have been laws in place for that in Brazil for more than a decade: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_Brazil#Drug_patents http://en.wikipedia.org/w

• HillRat 12y ago
  This has come up on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7531858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7531858 Brazil's Article 71 eventually led to TRIPS Article 27 § 2 and § 3(a), which affirm the rights of WTO member nations to exclude medical patents from protection; and Article 31, which allows for what has become known as "compulsory licensing" -- use of a patent without the consent of the patent holder. It's been a pretty effective club for developing nations to wield against pharmas, as drug companies know that if they don't provide or license their meds at favorable terms the states can just start manufacturing them without consent. The flip side, of course, is that the pharmas end up wanting to increase the pricing in developed nations, because the healthcare markets (especially in the US) can bear much higher costs. That's why Gilead is charging $900 for an HCV cure in Egypt (which has horrifically high rates of HCV infection), and almost $90K for it in the US. Now, there's a lot of drug coming online for HCV over the next few years, but right now Gilead has the market to itself and, at current pricing, it's basically a $1 trillion market in the US, EU and Japan. Gilead paid about $11b for Pharmasset (the drug developers) and needs to recoup its investment, so aggressive pricing in the developed world is unsurprising, if distressing.