Img: EFF (CC-BY)
A group of 1,525 civil society groups have signed onto a letter sponsored by the Citizen’s Trade Campaign urging Members of Congress to “to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a binding pact that poses significant threats to American jobs and wages, the environment, food safety and public health, and that falls far short of establishing the high standards the United States should require in a 21st Century trade agreement.” The full letter is available here. The section describing the intellectual property chapter’s threats to public health are below:
Many of the TPP’s intellectual property provisions would effectively delay the introduction of low-cost generic medications, increasing health care prices and reducing access to medicine both at home and abroad.
Pharmaceutical firms obtained much of their agenda in the TPP. This includes new monopoly rights that do not exist in past agreements with respect to biologic medicines, a category that includes cutting edge cancer treatments. The TPP also contains requirements that TPP nations allow additional 20-year patents for new uses of drugs already under patent, among other rules that would promote the “evergreening” of patent monopolies. Other TPP provisions may enable pharmaceutical companies to challenge Medicare drug listing decisions, Medicaid reimbursements and constrain future U.S. policy reforms to reduce healthcare costs.
With this agreement, the United States would shamefully roll back some of the hard-fought protections for access to medicine in trade agreements that were secured during the George W. Bush administration. Indeed, the pact eviscerates the core premise of the “May 10th” reforms that poor nations require more flexibility in medicine patent rules so as to ensure access. All of the TPP’s extreme medicine patent rules will apply equally to developing countries with only short transition periods for application of some of the rules.
