Tuesday, May 01, 2007

USA for innovation - what's it all about?

This quote from Salon.com:

USA for Innovation is a non-profit advocacy group whose primary purpose is to lobby for maximum strength intellectual property protection for American corporations. Its founder and executive director is Ken Adelman, a current member of the Defense Policy Board and long time Don Rumsfeld crony.

USA for Innovation's beef has to do with the decision by Thailand's Ministry of Health to issue compulsory licenses breaking the patents on a couple of AIDS drugs made by multinational pharmaceutical companies, including Merck's Efavirenz and Abbott Laboratories' Kaletra. The showdown has nothing at all to do with the outsourcing of jobs; it is, instead, ground zero in a globally intensifying struggle over making state-of-the-art drugs affordable for sick people in developing countries. Abbott Laboratories was initially so enraged by Thailand's effrontery that the company has threatened to stop introducing any of its new drugs in Thailand, but it has since backed down and offered to sell Kaletra at a greatly reduced price.

And here is the resulting trouble they caused for Thailand. More from other Thai blogs here, here, and here.


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