Union Carpenter Aff
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| Contact info | Finals | na | na |
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| JW Patterson HS Invitational | 2 | Harvard-Westlake AL | Shawn Rafferty |
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Contact InfoTournament: Contact info | Round: Finals | Opponent: na | Judge: na he/him Send any questions to | 11/12/21 |
JW Patterson R2 AffTournament: JW Patterson HS Invitational | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harvard-Westlake AL | Judge: Shawn Rafferty Resolved: The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to reduce intellectual property protections for medicines. The definitions for the round are as follows: “Ought” indicates that it is “necessary or desirable to perform the action indicated” (Cambridge Dict.) This means ought is purely moral and is separate from probable. “Reduce” means to “diminish in size, amount, extent, or number” (Merriam-Webster Dict.) The duty of the affirmative is to prove that intellectual property protections for medicines ought to be, in way of size, amount, extent, or number, diminished or lowered. “Intellectual property” is defined as a right or registration relating to “an idea, invention, or process” (Merriam-Webster Dict.) I offer the following observations: Observation 1: The duty of the affirmative is to prove why intellectual property protections for medicines ought to be reduced from their current state. This does not mean the affirmative must prove that all intellectual property protections for medicines are bad. The duty of the negative is to prove why the current amount of intellectual property protections for medicines are preferable, not why intellectual property protections for medicines are good. Observation 2: The burden of the affirmative is to prove that reducing intellectual property protections for medicine is an action the USFG has ought to do. The value of this round is quality of life which shall be upheld by the criterion of reducing structural violence in the form of inflated medicine prices. Contention One: COVID-19 and Data Exclusivity Current intellectual property protections are ineffective for combatting COVID-19 and hurt short-term innovation For pandemics and other public health emergencies, patents’ mix of costs and benefits is misaligned with what is needed for an effective policy response. The basic patent bargain, even when well struck, is to pay for more innovation down the road with slower diffusion of innovation today. In the context of a pandemic, that bargain is a bad one and should be rejected entirely. Here the imperative is to accelerate the diffusion of vaccines and other treatments, not slow it down. Giving drug companies the power to hold things up by blocking competitors and raising prices pushes in the completely wrong direction. Intellectual Property Protections increase drug prices and decrease availability Data exclusivity is a form of intellectual property protection that applies specifically to data from pharmaceutical clinical trials. While innovator firms run their own clinical trials to gain marketing approval, generic manufacturers typically rely on the innovator’s clinical trials for the same approval. Data exclusivity rules keep generic firms from relying on that data for 5 to 12 years, depending on the specific law. Data exclusivity operates independently of patent protection and can block generic manufacturers from gaining marketing approval even if the patent has expired or the original pharmaceutical product does not qualify for patent protection. Contention Two: Minority Communities in US Action to lower the prices of prescription drugs is also an issue of health equity. Black Americans are among the communities facing disproportionate impacts of COVID-19; due to systemic racism, they face higher incidence of preexisting conditions and poorer health outcomes than white Americans from numerous chronic health conditions, including diabetes and heart disease, that lead to greater risks from the coronavirus and are treated with prescription drugs that have sky-high drug prices. For instance, the price of a single vial of Humalog, a commonly used insulin, has increased by more than 1,200 percent since its debut in 1996. Minority communities use comparatively less medication than white communities, with or without coverage Without any drug coverage, white persons used one-third more medications, on average, than black persons and Hispanics, and spent 20 to 40 percent more, respectively. Hispanic beneficiaries tended to fill more expensive medications although white persons had the best access to diabetic agents: nearly 70 percent took insulin or oral diabetic agents during the year compared with only about 50 percent of black persons (p0.05) or Hispanics (p0.05). Having drug coverage somewhat lessened these differences although the effect was consistent with only managed care benefits. For minority beneficiaries with Medicaid drug benefits, medication use remained much lower than for white beneficiaries, although average prescription prices dropped to relatively similar levels. Out-of-pocket expenses also declined considerably although dually eligible white beneficiaries paid about twice as much for their medications compared with Hispanics (p0.05) or black persons (p0.05). Access to diabetic agents became more similar between white and Hispanic persons with Medicaid, but not for black persons. Generic drugs are cheaper and safe In 2016, the U.S. spent $450 billionTrusted Source on prescription drug costs, and spending is projected to increase to $610 billion by 2021. Even though 90 percentTrusted Source of prescriptions filled in the U.S. are for generic medications, brand-name medications account for 74 percentTrusted Source of spending on medications in the U.S. Generics save Americans billions every year. In fact, generics saved U.S. consumers $253 billionTrusted Source in 2017 and over $1 trillionTrusted Source in the past decade. In this article you’ll learn about the main differences between generic and brand-name medications. What are generic drugs? FDA gives patent and exclusivityTrusted Source protection to brand manufacturers to allow them to profit from their innovation and research for several years. During this time, no generics can compete with the brand. Once the patent has expired, generics can enter the market through a shortened FDA approval process. Generic medications need to meet the same quality, safety, and effectiveness standards as brands. Most active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) and generic medications are made outside the U.S. in countries like China, India, and various other countries. Are generic drugs always safe to take? Generics have to prove they are bioequivalentTrusted Source to the brand version. Bioequivalence means the generic works the same way and provides the same benefits. It’s the FDA’s job to monitor drug safety. They inspect over 3000 drug manufacturer facilities around the globe every year. The FDA also monitors generic medication safety after drug approval. If the FDA discovers problems with safety or quality, a recall is issued for the affected medication to keep the public safe. The evidence clearly shows a disproportionate effect on minority communities when compared to white communities regarding inflated prescription drug prices. White people are more likely to be able to pay for the increased prices, however structural issues make it less likely that minorities are able to pay for said treatments and thus lead to more minorities not being able to use prescribed drugs. Those that do pay the increased prices consequently suffer financially and from a higher chance of poverty, reducing overall quality of life. This proves that inflated prices are a perpetuator of structural violence and thus the Aff reduces structural violence through lowering prices. Contention Three: International Medicine Prices From the onset, the TRIPS IP regime created imbalance between innovation, market monopoly, and medicines access, because it failed to take into consideration the health burden, development needs and local conditions of the various countries that make up the WTO. This has led to several issues. First, the market monopoly of IP rights, which allows the corporation to set the market for drugs, has created a privileged societal class with access to lifesaving medication distinguishing them from those excluded from access to available medications. This phenomenon is vividly illustrated in the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1990s and early 2000s. While HIV/AIDS patients in developed countries were able to afford antiretroviral (ARVs) treatments, which had been developed, approved and patented as early as 1987, many patients in Africa and other parts of the developing world could not afford the approximately USD 12,000 per annum treatment at that time. By 2001, approximately 2.4 million people in the region had died of AIDS. The South African government intervened to reduce the cost of ARVs by amending its domestic patent laws to allow the authorization of parallel imports of patented pharmaceuticals and to encourage the use of generic drugs, but it was sued by the US industry group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). Though the lawsuit was eventually dropped, it highlights the measures pharmaceutical corporations, backed by some national governments, are willing to take to protect their profits at the cost of human lives. Significantly, we see how law (or the threat of legal action) is used not only to protect and expand the profitability of a certain kind of property but, as Anjali Vats and Deidré Keller have taught us, also reveals IP law’s racial investments in whiteness and its continuing implications for racial (in)equality, particularly in the way it informs systems of ownership, circulation, and distribution of knowledge. Subpoint a) Vietnam When defining polypharmacy by including herbal and traditional medicine, the proportion of people with diabetes with polypharmacy was 40.8, which suggests that people with substitute, supplement, or rely on non-pharmaceutical treatment for their diabetes. A study from Vietnam reported that reasons for this include people believing that a combination of conventional and herbal and traditional medicine will improve the effectiveness of their diabetes treatment 33. A study conducted in the United States among Vietnamese immigrants showed that people with T2D even stop taking prescribed medicine when using traditional medicine because of worries of side effects of prescribed medicines 34. Further, in Vietnam, using herbal and traditional medicine is considered a therapy with minimal or no side effect and entails lower financial costs 35,36. This may be explained by traditional and herbal medicine having a long and honored history in Vietnam: for thousands of years, Vietnamese people have treated diseases with herbs and plants, which were gathered from gardens and forests. Thus, using traditional and herbal medicine is still an important component of national efforts to promote public health in urban and rural populations in Vietnam 37. Nowadays, using traditional and herbal medicine are widely used beside Western medicine and traditional and herbal medicine are especially used when Western medicine is considered ineffective or too expensive 37. Neglecting to use prescription drugs to treat chronic health conditions and instead relying on less regulated, potentially dangerous or ineffective herbal remedies overall decreases quality of life by worsening existing conditions. By reducing intellectual property protections, prices will lower to a more affordable level and allow for treating conditions with prescription medicines, reducing the risk and improving quality of life. Subpoint b) Peru The reality is that fragile gains in health in developing country TPP partners are at risk from the USTR proposal. For example, Peru is a low- to middle-income country with high levels of poverty and inequality and with a high burden of chronic and noncommunicable diseases that require medicines over the long term. Prices for patented medicines to treat cancer, for example, are unaffordable for households and have exhausted most of the government’s resources available to pay for treatments under the public health system. | 11/12/21 |
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