The Washington Post | October 26, 2001 | BY Paul Blustein, Washington Post Staff Writer
Amid its own efforts to obtain cheap supplies of Cipro to fight the anthrax threat, the Bush administration is battling to keep Brazil and other developing countries from securing broad rights to override patents and lower the prices of drugs for treating AIDS and other illnesses.
The dispute is raging at the World Trade Organization and poses a serious threat to reaching agreement on the launch of new global trade negotiations at a major WTO meeting scheduled for Nov. 9 to 13 in Doha, Qatar. The Bush administration, eager to boost the global trading system and advance international cooperation in the face of terrorism, has attached enormous importance to ensuring that the Doha meeting does not end in failure and discord like the last such parley two years ago in Seattle.
The drug patent problem "is one of the most difficult issues remaining," said an official at the WTO's Geneva headquarters. "It's really proven a tough nut to crack," the official said, adding that the WTO leadership spent most of last weekend trying to strike a compromise, without success. Joined by India and dozens of countries elsewhere in the developing world, Brazil is seeking a declaration at the Doha meeting that, in Washington's view, would drastically weaken WTO rules that protect patents and other forms of intellectual property worldwide. The proposed declaration, motivated in part by anger over the high prices drug companies have charged for AIDS medicines in poor countries, states that "nothing in the [WTO intellectual-property] agreement shall prevent governments from taking measures to protect public health."
At issue is a trade-off -- giving the public access to cheap medicine, vs. allowing drug companies to recoup their research and development costs -- that has long confronted policymakers, most recently during this week's controversy over Cipro.
Canadian health officials said at one point that in view of the danger posed by anthrax, they would suspend the Cipro patent held by Bayer AG so that generic drugmakers could produce plentiful amounts of the antibiotic at low prices, and Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, hinted that he might do the same before he bargained Bayer down to a deal of 95 cents a pill.
Critics of the administration and the drug industry contended that the Cipro decision was linked to Washington's efforts to protect drug companies' interests in the WTO dispute. By failing to suspend Bayer's patent, which would have permitted the widespread production of generic Cipro, Thompson "is cutting corners on public health to protect [the U.S.] negotiating position in the Doha WTO meeting," said Jamie Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology.
U.S. officials disputed that interpretation, asserting the administration did not need to take the extreme step of suspending a patent because other cheap antibiotics such as tetracycline are effective against anthrax. But they acknowledged they face a tough struggle in hammering out an acceptable deal on the issue at Doha.
One major problem is that the WTO rules on intellectual property, which were made final in 1995 as part of a sweeping international trade agreement known as the Uruguay Round, are supposed to allow countries to suspend patents when they face national security or public health emergencies -- the AIDS crisis in sub-Saharan Africa being an example of such an emergency. But the rules on those exceptions to patent holders' rights are ambiguous.
A U.S. trade official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Washington "is trying to be responsive" to demands from many countries, especially in Africa, to clarify the rules and has proposed language aimed at doing so. In another concession to sub-Saharan African countries, many of which complain they are unable to design modern patent systems for pharmaceuticals, the United States has offered to provide them a 10-year extension, until 2016, to comply with the WTO rules.
But the official said the language proposed by Brazil and its allies "is much broader and would really undo" the rules protecting patents. "It would basically be saying, 'If we feel we aren't obliged to follow [the rules], we don't have to.' " The U.S. opposition to the Brazilian language is backed by Switzerland, Japan and Australia, among others.
In part, the Brazilian language reflects the unhappiness within the developing world with the intellectual-property rules. Many officials in developing countries, along with some Western trade experts, contend the intellectual-property part of the pact bestows enormous economic benefits on advanced countries where sophisticated products are developed, while imposing great costs on poor nations.
It isn't clear how far Brazil and its allies are prepared to go. Brazil is eager to secure concessions on agricultural trade from the United States and the European Union, so it may accept a compromise that would allow a new round to be launched.
"We hope that we find common ground," said Rubens Barbosa, Brazil's ambassador to the United States. "But this is a very important issue to us, the relationship between health and patents."The Washington Post:
