“We are disappointed that the U.S. Trade Representative’s office has chosen to deny a request by the world’s poorest countries that is fair, sensible and takes into account the multiple challenges these countries face, including a heavy burden of infectious diseases such as HIV and AIDS and [tuberculosis],” said Rohit Malpani, director of policy and analysis at Doctors Without Borders’s Access Campaign. Doctors Without Borders is a humanitarian organization that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999. “Unsurprisingly, the approach adopted by the U.S. Trade Representative is not too different from the approach preferred by the multinational pharmaceutical industry.”
The Obama administration has spent over a year
pressuring the Indian government to abandon its policy of providing a less expensive generic version of a new cancer drug. India, which features a per capita income of about $1,400 a year, is not considered a least developed country, but rather a “lower-middle-income country” and, as such, is required to comply with WTO treaties.
Although TRIPS requires countries to issue pharmaceutical patents and implement a host of other standards that give drugmakers greater pricing power, the treaty
explicitly protects countries’ rights to produce generic versions of medications under a variety of circumstances.
In India, Bayer was charging $5,000 a month for its cancer drug — a price so high that only 2 percent of Indian patients who needed it could afford it. When the government licensed a generic producer to provide the medicine for $157 a month, the Obama administration
declared in a congressional hearing that the move was an “egregious” TRIPS violation.
