Earlier this month, the representatives of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) parties announced they had concluded five years of negotiations by agreeing to
final terms.
Simply put, the TPPA is designed to block the sick and the poor from accessing affordable generic and biosimilar medicines. If the TPPA is ultimately approved by its member nations, it will enshrine a billions-over-millions trade-off: billions of dollars in profits will be made by patent-holding pharmaceutical corporations, and millions of people will needlessly suffer and die.But the legislative bodies of those member nations, including the U.S. Congress, have not yet signed off on the deal. And many are facing significant pressure not to. That pressure provides an historic opportunity for advocates to not just scuttle a bad trade deal, but to elevate the human right to health.
As it stands, the TPPA is a certifiably deadly weapon. The final terms include
multiple provisions that extend both the scope and length of patent protections. For example,
the agreement guarantees market exclusivity for patented biologic drugs for at least five years in all TPPA countries, and likely eight years of de facto exclusion of more affordable versions. Biologic drugs are produced using living systems such as bacteria, or plant and animal cells, and have been particularly effective in response to cancer.
Under current law,
the poorest of the TPPA countries, including Malaysia, Mexico, Peru and Vietnam, do not grant monopoly protection for biologic drugs. But the TPPA terms will compel them to do so within just a few years, despite the deadly impact that higher drug prices will inevitably have on their low-income population. The TPPA also sanctions "evergreening" of patented medicines at the national level, a process where barriers to generics are extended when new patents are granted for altered uses or methods of existing medicines
Comment: Americans have been repeatedly traumatized by their government's criminal activities for the past 14 years. But there is a difference between experiencing fear in a healthy way, and being manipulated by it: