Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12782

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Thailand to keep generic drugs scheme: minister
Yahoo Finance 2008 Feb 8
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080208/hl_afp/thailandhealthdrugspharma

Full text:

Thailand’s new health minister said Friday he would keep the country’s controversial generic drugs programme but stopped short of saying whether the new government would expand the scheme.

“My position is that I am not going to cancel CL,” Public Health Minister Chiya Sasomsub said, referring to so-called compulsory licenses, which temporarily suspend patent protections and allow production of copycat drugs.

The generic drug programme was one of the most contentious policies of Thailand’s just-departed military regime, angering Western pharmaceutical giants as it allows governments to override patent protections.

The army-backed government already overrode patents for popular heart drug Plavix and two key AIDS medicines — Kaletra and Efavirenz — and was planning to expand the programme to include cancer drugs.

Apart from the three drugs, the previous government struck a last-minute deal with Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis, which agreed to give its leukaemia medicine Glivec to most Thai patients for free.

While drug makers have derided the generic drug scheme as an infringement on their intellectual property rights, activists have hailed it as a “beacon” for other developing nations seeking to provide treatments to the poor.

But soon after taking office on Wednesday, Chiya said he would review the scheme, alarming local activists.

On Friday, Chiya met with about 50 Thai health and consumer activists, who urged the new minister to press ahead with the copycat drug programme.

Following the meeting, Chiya said he would keep the scheme for now but stopped short of saying whether the new government would expand it to include more drugs.

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909