WENDELL HUSSEY | Cadet | CONTACT
The worlds giant pharmaceutical companies have today expressed outrage at calls for mammoth profits to be put aside for the sake of humanity.
This comes after US President Joe Biden threw his support behind a proposed World Trade Organization (WTO) waiver of intellectual property rights for those spicy cough preventer doses.
The proposal was put forward by South Africa and India in the hopes that a handful of giant multinational companies will not be able to monopolise life-saving treatments that they price poor countries out of.
It’s believed that of the 700 million doses given out so far, only 0.2 percent have been in low-income countries – presumably to members of Royal families and parliament of course.
So, in an effort to ensure that people in poor countries aren’t left to die because they can’t afford cough preventers, the WTO proposal is calling for large companies to hand over the design so the world can fight this crisis together – rather than simply let a few companies make monumental profits.
However, the proposal that would need every single one of the 164 WTO member nations to approve it has drawn outrage from the bosses of the huge medical companies who have been left to make staggering amounts of money because they keep the IP to medicine under lock and key.
“This isn’t fair,” said Astra Johnson, a spokesperson for the BPO (Big Pharma Organisation).
“We shouldn’t have to share the right to make money off these doses which we got out the door first,” he said.
“Even if our companies were given huge amounts of public money to help develop our product which we’ve slapped our IP on.”
“Nobody should be able to infringe on our right to create a bidding war for medicine that saves lives.”
“The system is here to ensure we can charge what we want for our products, not help people access medicine they need to survive.”
“It doesn’t matter if this is a once in a century crisis that is costing thousands of lives every day.”
“We have the legal right to make profits and that shouldn’t be put on hold for anything or anyone, and we’ll spend millions of dollars fighting for that in court.”
“So good luck to em.”
