ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought renewed attention to the topic of challenging drug patents in the interest of public health. Pharmaceutical companies have already begun to patent existing medicines for the treatment and prevention of SARS-CoV-2, affording them exclusive manufacturing rights over vital medicines. Advocates have raised concerns regarding the pricing of COVID-19 drugs, as well as patent monopolies on the manufacture of COVID-19 treatments. The HIV/AIDS pandemic provides a useful lens through which we can analyse existing pathways for challenging pharmaceutical patents in the context of global pandemic. In this article, we review three legal pathways for overriding and seizing patents on medicines by describing cases in which they were employed to make antiretroviral drugs more accessible to people living with HIV. Last, we highlight the weaknesses inherent in these pathways and offer advocacy and policy suggestions for how to strengthen these pathways to improve access to COVID-19 treatments as they become available in the United States and globally.
Subject(s)
Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome , COVID-19 Drug Treatment , Drug Industry , Humans , Pandemics/prevention & control , SARS-CoV-2 , United StatesABSTRACT
The claim that anti-malaria drugs, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, can cure COVID-19 became a focus of fierce political battles that pitted promoters of these pharmaceuticals, Presidents Bolsonaro and Trump among them, against "medical elites." At the center of these battles are different meanings of effectiveness in medicine, the complex role of randomized clinical trials (RCTs) in proving such effectiveness, the task of medical experts and the state in regulating pharmaceuticals, patients' activism, and the collective production of medical knowledge. This article follows the trajectory of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as anti-COVID-19 drugs, focusing on the reception of views of their main scientific promoter, the French infectious disease specialist, Didier Raoult. The surprising career of these drugs, our text proposes, is fundamentally a political event, not in the narrow sense of engaging specific political fractions, but in the much broader sense of the politics of public participation in science.