Pharma

The Hatch-Waxman Act, despite its intentions, has become a monopoly-extending machine that prioritizes pharmaceutical profits over public health. A 40th birthday is a good chance for anyone to rethink where their life is headed — and major legislation is no exception.

The patent system exists to promote scientific innovation to benefit the public, not to enrich private interests regardless of the merits of their scientific contributions. Yet that is precisely what PERA and PREVAIL would do by granting Big Pharma even more sweeping government monopolies and associated price-gouging power.

The FTC has won its lawsuit against Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceutical executive infamous for jacking up the price of the antiparasitic drug Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 overnight in 2015 and later using his ill-gotten fortune to buy an exclusive Wu-Tang Clan album for $2 million. Shkreli is the quintessential corporate ghoul, having already racked up convictions for securities fraud—which resulted in an indefinite ban from the securities industries—and failure to pay $1.26 million in New York state taxes. Now, his price gouging has finally caught up with him, as the FTC successfully argued that he spearheaded an anti-competitive scheme to monopolize the drug. The presiding judge found Shkreli’s conduct to be “egregious, deliberate, repetitive, long-running, and ultimately dangerous,” issuing a $64.6 million fine and imposing a lifetime ban from the pharmaceutical industry. 

The Revolving Door Project’s Ananya Kalahasti and Will Royce released the following statement regarding the US Chamber of Commerce’s lawsuit regarding the Inflation Reduction Act’s Medicare prescription drug negotiation program, and a financial conflict of interest regarding the judge in the Southern District of Ohio.

While the Inflation Reduction Act might be a new approach to drug prices, Big Pharma’s strategy of suing to keep prices high is a years-old strategy.

Mark Rohrbaugh, a mid-level staffer at the National Institutes of Health, has consistently blocked the use of march-in rights to seize patents on high-cost drugs.

If the Walter Reed vaccine proves effective against Covid-19 and its variants in further tests, it will be a vaccine wholly created by a public institution through use of public funds. Every aspect of the vaccine production process should be widely and freely shared to ensure globally distributed manufacturing. Widespread, equitable availability of effective vaccines at truly affordable prices would go a long way in achieving your stated goal of vaccinating the world.

In his gig as a global health consultant at a powerful D.C. business strategy firm that has financial ties to one of the two major COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers, Jha has kept his client roster under wraps despite publicly promising to release a client list.

But for all of this, neither party’s congressional leaders have directly challenged the main legal mechanism that accounts for those high costs—namely, intellectual property. You’d think members of Congress would recognize the political salience of picking a fight with one of the most hated industries in America. So why isn’t anyone on Capitol Hill even talking about intellectual property’s role in driving high drug prices, and taking the PTO to task to do something about it?

Biden’s COVID czar has gone from ‘Mr. Fix-It’ to grim reaper, steering the administration’s pandemic response to catastrophic lows.