NOTe live in a world marked by unequal access to medicines between the countries of the North and those of the South. This reality has been verified during the Covid-19 pandemic. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa pointed this out to Emmanuel Macron at the Summit for a New Global Financial Pact in June in Paris.
Mr. Ramaphosa thus recalled the monopolization by the countries of the North of vaccines during the pandemic and their refusal to provide them to African States. “when [ils] forward[aient] most needed”. He also reported the“tremendous resistance” from the World Trade Organization when African countries expressed their desire to produce their own medicines. Which, he says, raises the following questions: Are big pharma profits more important than life? And is the health of people in the North more important than that of people in the South?
We live in a world where, in effect, pharmaceutical companies make maximum profits without taking into account the needs of the poor. As a result, millions of people living in low-income areas die every year because cures for their illnesses are not developed or are marketed at unaffordable prices. The unavailability of drugs in these regions is partly due to the rules governing pharmaceutical innovation: these authorize innovators to patent their products for a period of twenty years. These monopolies encourage innovation, but result in exorbitant prices.
Global health could be greatly improved if medical technologies were deployed more effectively. One way to achieve this is to create strong incentives that link drug development, production and distribution bonuses to health gains achieved. We propose the creation of an international health impact fund (HIF) financed by the public authorities which would allocate a significant fixed sum each year. FIS would co-exist with the current patent regime and lead pharmaceutical innovators to prioritize serious diseases concentrated among poor populations and against which the most cost-effective health gains can be achieved.
Grant free licenses
The FIS could be launched with annual allocations of around 2 billion euros. Any innovator who registers a medicine with the FIS would then receive, over the following ten years, an annual compensation corresponding to his health gains made on all the medicines registered during the previous year. In return, the innovator would agree to sell the registered drug without a price increase or to grant free licenses to others. Those who register a drug with the FIS would remain free to charge high prices in rich non-contributing countries. This would give an additional reason for innovators to register their products with the FIS and for rich countries to join the financing partnership.
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