People's Democracy

The Patents Regime & Anthrax

Naazish Abbas

AT a time when the entire Western establishment is resonating with patriotic calls for `buy more, fly more’, in order to support slagging airline business, one really wonders how much patriotism is inspiring these calls, and how much of this is actually just cold marketing logic, coopting current emotion and packaging it in the form of airline tickets. Big business being strong enough to employ the services of the US president as its salesman.

The case of the airlines [and just the ownership/management, not the thousands sacked!] being the first to manage getting a sop worth billions of dollars even in the early days of the crisis was shocking enough. But the goings-on in another business sector, namely pharmaceuticals, has also got people thinking about the ways of big business, even in troubled times.

In recent days, at least eight people in the US have tested positive for Anthrax, and thousands are said to be taking or hoarding vast quantities of Cipro, the popular anti-biotic cure for Anthrax. It was perhaps quite normal to see a sharp rise in the share-price of the German company Bayer, the only company that has the patent for producing the drug. They are obviously `doing well’ in corporate parlance and would and should get remunerated by the market. But this whole Anthrax business has brought to light the dark side of the logic of patenting.

Though there are at least two years for the patent on the production of this anti-biotic to go, the government of Canada, due to the tremendous increase in the demand for the drug, had ordered about one million doses of a generic, cheaper alternative. The Canadian government has actually violated the tough patent laws, citing an extraordinary situation, and secured more medicines at cheaper rates for its citizens. According to the Washington Post, (Online, October 21), Elie Betito, the director of public and government affairs at Apotex in Toronto, [ a firm that manufactures generic drugs, which had been asked to supply the drugs] said:

"We had a call at the beginning of the week from the government to see if we could produce the product in a short time span. They [the government] had contacted Bayer, but they couldn’t deliver it within two and a half weeks."

Elie Betito said , the company planned to deliver 9,00,000 tablets by November 8, at 99 cents a tablet. This would have been as against the $1.83 a tablet at which Bayer sells Cipro.

While Canada at least went through the motions of exploring ways and means of getting around the system of patenting, the government of the US of A made no such attempts. While experts in the United States said that in this case, they would have been well within their rights to break the patent laws, Tony Jewell, a spokesman for the US Health and Human Services said,

"We do not believe that breaking the patent is necessary. Medical professionals across the country as well as pharmacists have said they believe it is unnecessary. It would not save money to break the patent. We would have to pay Bayer hundreds of millions of dollars. And Bayer has assured us they can meet our demands under our timetable." [The Washinton Post Online, October 20, 2001].

According to the BBC, Bayer has eventually managed to stave off a bid to break its patent, as it says it is "capable of producing enough to meet the requirements". It is worthwhile to see why this case is so relevant to us in India here.

The patents regime is held up as the bright new world order that India should happily walk into. But this little example of how, even in times of such a grave crisis, one company can hold the world’s `greatest’ democracy to ransom, should serve as a warning to those in the Joint Select Committee of the Indian Parliament , which is presently evaluating the Indian version of the patents regime.