Good on you, EU!
“The EU is planning a compulsory licensing system to allow it to take control of the manufacture of drugs and vaccines during a public health emergency, despite calls from pharmaceutical groups to protect patents.”
---
RT @ellenthoen
The European Commission’s plans for EU wide compulsory licensing of patents on products needed in a crisis situation. via @FT @jamie_love @peoplesvaccine https://on.ft.com/3HbFOqt
https://twitter.com/ellenthoen/status/1650558771649716225
bonifartius 𒂼𒄄
@oxonandrew while i'm not a fan of big pharma, this is the definition of EUSSR.
@bonifartius This move by the EU is more understandable once you realise that most of the drugs and vaccines we take are discovered and developed by publicly-funded research that ultimately is clinically trialled and taken to market by ‘big pharma’…as such, we already “paid for” the medicines we consume. Hence, a Pandemic should be the time the public benefits most from our investment.
@oxonandrew pharma is a bigger market than defense. should i have called it medical industrial complex instead? but you are right, there probably is no small pharma :)
just because i paid for it already with money robbed from me doesn't mean it's right to rob others, no matter how much i dislike them.
additionally, this line of thought is retroactively adding terms to a contract. it's like getting subsidies for house improvements and some time later the terms are changed to that you have to house strangers because of the housing crisis.
it's a slippery slope no matter how much one wants to discuss it away. way to hell is paved with good intentions.
@bonifartius You seem to err on the side of living with past mistakes instead of working towards correcting them. if we know that we have been giving away our publicly funded research for free--would it not be better to start a path of reclaiming our ownership of these discoveries/innovations instead of letting the past lie in the past?
@oxonandrew the EU is free to fix past mistakes by acting accordingly in the future. they are free to use the money stolen from their population to build up their own R&D. they are free to add a clause to future funding that the results are public goods.
they can not decide that everything now is owned by them as they deem fit. it is not "reclaiming our ownership" it is retroactively declaring ownership because politicians in the past (also corrupt) didn't put clauses about public ownership of the results into the funding contracts.
there's a difference between ignoring errors made in the past and accepting and learning from them. declaring ownership is not learning from the errors, it's using force to bend the rules to cover up the past mistakes.
@bonifartius Fair point.