Since Intellectual
Property Rights (IPRs) refer to the rights to exclude others
from using or commercializing an asset protected under a trademark, copyright,
or patent, they sometimes confer negative rights. This concept shows that there
is a growing need to revise the Intellectual
Property Law in South Africa (SA) to ensure
that those who want to access healthcare aren’t denied healthcare lifesaving
medication.
The importance of IP law in terms of accessing
healthcare is that it provides the way how the state grants IPRs to
pharmaceutical companies to prevent someone else from manufacturing the same
drugs. Remember that the IPR related to the protection of drugs is a patent
that lasts for 20 years in most of the countries worldwide. In the period of
those 20 years, the company enjoys a monopoly that allows it to determine the
pricing for the medicine. The main problem with this field is that when drugs
are priced high, they often leave people in desperate and fatal situations.
That’s why it is essential to revise the liberal Patent
Law of South Africa that indeed
appears helpful to bring innovations in the medication sector, but while
leading to excessive granting of licenses, thus fuelling pharmaceutical
monopolies.
Considering the need to revise IP
law in South Africa and many other
countries, the World Health Organization (WHO) provided a list of some
essential rules needed for country-specific epidemic diseases, etc. WHO stated
that public health principles, in the circumstances of access to medications,
are supported by a wide range of national to international legal policy
instruments, encompassing the Constitution of WHO. Moreover, the implementation
of Intellectual Property Rules in South Africa or several other nations from a human rights perspective
should be governed by principles that support public health goals, as well as
access to medicines.
Yet, what many pharmaceutical firms have been into is
to monopolizing the manufacturing of drugs just for profit. It is common in the
case of medicines required for cancer, malaria, TB, and hepatitis C that are
the leading causes of death in South Africa. It has been found that because of
high pricing, only 7 out of the existing 24 medications for cancer are
available in the public health system of South Africa.
What South Africa Is
Doing Or Should Do?
Dr. Eric Goemaere, a physician who introduced and
pioneered HIV treatment in SA in 2017, said that for cancer, they are where
they were in the starting phase of the 90s for HIV. The treatments for these
two and many other diseases appear too expensive and complicated that people
don’t even want to look at them. The most disconcerting thoughts are- how long
it will take or it took to create and make ARV (antiretroviral) available for
curing illness and resistance put up by pharmaceutical companies while the
patient is dying.
In such instances, the Treatment Action Campaign appears
as a helping hand. It is a South African organization working to ensure that
people have access to suitable medical treatments. By compelling big
pharmaceutical organizations to grant licenses to other companies to
manufacture generic antiretroviral, it is into making sure that the ARVs are
accessible to all South Africans at affordable prices. Nevertheless, there are
many new antiretrovirals, and medicines to treat TB, cancer, and hepatitis C,
but unfortunately, they are unaffordable.
Dr. Aaron Motsoaledi, the health minister of SA in
2017, was quoted by saying that they must emphasize and come up with innovative
research and development (R&D) models, which delinks the expense of R&D
from the final cost of medicines. Besides, South Africa should look for
alternate approaches like incentivizing R&D through grants, cash prizes,
etc., rather than continue advocating patent monopolies allowing excessive
pricing for drugs. And it should support global leadership by investing in
researches and funding researchers for such initiatives. The nation must also
invest in models of drug development and drugs of tomorrow instead of remaining
trapped in the market logic of Intellectual
Property (IP) in South Africa or outside.
It is worth examining how a person’s health can be
held to ransom by pharmaceutical companies that focus only on profit and refuse
to sell drugs at affordable prices, along with stopping others from doing so.
What Does It Mean for
an Ordinary South African?
It means there may come a phase when the person needs
unaffordable medicines protected under patent preventing other manufacturers
from making an affordable alternative, thus forcing people to think about
unaffordable drugs. It further means that health, human right, and
constitutional right are commoditized so that the companies with patent rights
can use human sufferings to make obscene profits. In other words, the right to
access to health for ordinary people is being undermined.
The government in May 2018 approved an IP policy to
enable better access to affordable and high-quality medicines. However, this is
yet to be implemented as the proposed reforms still have to be made.
Ultimately, what the country needs to emphasize here is not just the
complications of IP law in South Africa, but also the
violation of human rights. It is because ordinary people are often denied to
use their universal right to access healthcare.
For more visit: https://www.kashishipr.com/
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