Medicine, Money & Morality : A Contrary View

 

 

Medicine, Money  & Morality : A Contrary View

 

 

 

There are two vociferous demand these days :

 

·      a loud cry against the high prices of medicines and health essentials 

·      an appeal to make covid vaccines off-patent 

 

 

The former complains against lawlessness ; the latter demands a temporary lawlessness. 

The former is creating waves domestically and the latter internationally. 

Strangely, the both have a common unanswered question.

 

 

Yes, we all agree that one should not be greedy, one should not be insensitive and one should not be adamant in these times. And therefore, there is a strong case for the covid vaccines to go off-patent. However, there is also a counter argument. It says that before giving the waiver, one should also consider the implications for the next pandemic. 

 

Will during the next pandemic, investors put billions of dollars in inventing vaccine if they know that the vaccine they would fund could go off-patent within a year of invention ? So, by saving a little costs, we could be risking millions of lives in future pandemics or probably the entire mankind….! 

 

Last year, when most saw pandemic as a misery, a few saw a market within the misery. And these few could see the market only because they were equipped with the lens called “patent protection”. As a result, the world has got vaccine within less than twelve months. So is patent protection an evil or a boon ? By getting vaccine off-patent, are we not trying to kill the gander that laid the golden eggs ( golden eggs is saved lives ).

 

The second noise too has a similar story. Yes, we all know that high prices of medicines and support systems are not desirable. And that the black marketing of essentials must be detested. But is it also not true that because the prices reached high levels that the supply got augmented. High prices made it possible for the traders to source medicines even from expensive channels and by making huge advance payments. Had there been a price-control law, the supply would have remained restricted as there would have been no incentives for manufacturers to work overtime and for workers to work in these difficult times and for traders to take risks to increase the supply. Therefore, the high prices are not the evil or the cause of the problem ; they are the response mechanism that the system creates as its defense. When one gets fever, it not that fever which is the illness, it is the body’s response mechanism to fight the anti-body.

 

Now coming back to patents and copyright but with a slightly different perspective.

 

  

People often ask me why 1980s saw the worst of Hindi cinema and was dominated by fixed formula films. One section of  research points at the inability of makers to experiment. The other school of thought blames the taste of the audience. However, the real reason lies in the fact that 1980s was the time when video piracy and music piracy were at the peak. This meant hardly any reward for the copyright owner as people preferred watching pirated video cassettes at home than going to cinemahalls. The reward for experimenting and associated risk was missing, so makers preferred fixed formula films.

 

However in 90s, the arrival of multiplexes of 90s, the re-proliferation of the overseas market and the development of satellite rights market, provided a fair incentive for makers to experiment and thus we could see much better films.

 

Using the same principle, imagine if there were lax patent laws, what would have been the quality of medicines that we would have recd all these years and worse how many life-saving drugs would have ever seen the light of the day.

 

However,  the off-patent group would still argue, and rightly so, that while profit is good but how much of profit is good ?

 

So the million dollar question that needs an answer is  What should be a limit to profit ?. And if that is a million dollar question then there is a billion dollar question that precedes it ‘Who should decide the limits to profit ?’. And even before that, there is a trillion dollar question ‘How does one decide the limit ?’

 

I don’t have answers to these. But whoever attempts to should be prepared  to face both – the bouqets and the brickbats ; and the latter ones in larger numbers. And if you don’t believe me, just recollect that the patent laws and the high price of medicine are instruments to fight the pandemic, yet they have become the punching bags……Life’s like that.

 

 

 

 

-       Deepesh Salgia