Bronx Science Papageorgiou Neg
| Tournament | Round | Opponent | Judge | Cites | Round Report | Open Source | Edit/Delete |
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| Emory | 2 | Strake Jesuit JK | Torson, Adam |
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| Emory | 3 | Presentation AB | Shazar, Aashril |
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| Harvard | 2 | Scripps Ranch AS | Anderson, Sam |
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| Isidore Newman | 1 | Montgomery CH | Ciocca, Amanda |
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| Isidore Newman | 3 | Harrison JC | Coates, David |
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| Isidore Newman | 6 | Little Rock Central MG | Chen, Victor |
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| SEPOCT | 1 | any | any |
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| Scarsdale | 5 | Prospe ST | Hang, Chianli |
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| Scarsdale | 4 | SouEug KS | Das, Sreyaash |
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| Scarsdale | 2 | Lexton AA | Siegal, Zach |
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| any | 2 | any | any |
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| Tournament | Round | Report |
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| Emory | 2 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit JK | Judge: Torson, Adam AC - OST priv entities can't put space junk |
| Emory | 3 | Opponent: Presentation AB | Judge: Shazar, Aashril larp round |
| Harvard | 2 | Opponent: Scripps Ranch AS | Judge: Anderson, Sam ac - psycho k theory adv |
| Isidore Newman | 1 | Opponent: Montgomery CH | Judge: Ciocca, Amanda AC - China |
| Isidore Newman | 3 | Opponent: Harrison JC | Judge: Coates, David AC - Prisoners |
| Isidore Newman | 6 | Opponent: Little Rock Central MG | Judge: Chen, Victor AC - asian k |
| Scarsdale | 5 | Opponent: Prospe ST | Judge: Hang, Chianli AC - Policy V2 |
| Scarsdale | 4 | Opponent: SouEug KS | Judge: Das, Sreyaash 1ac- india |
| Scarsdale | 2 | Opponent: Lexton AA | Judge: Siegal, Zach AC - util disclosure t adv |
To modify or delete round reports, edit the associated round.
Cites
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0 - ContactTournament: any | Round: 1 | Opponent: any | Judge: any Contact: hangouts/email: papageorgioui@bxscience.edu | 9/17/21 |
0 - PLEASE NOTETournament: any | Round: 2 | Opponent: any | Judge: any SepOct: I lost my computer w all my documents so I never had the chance to disclose my sepoct cases but I do have the general file I used so that checks back against evidence ethics or whatever disclosure theory you wanna run | 12/11/21 |
NOVDEC - CP - Work to RuleTournament: Isidore Newman | Round: 3 | Opponent: Harrison JC | Judge: Coates, David CP Plan Text: Prisoners ought to make “work to rule” the primary method of collective bargaining Working to rule is defined as “a form of industrial action where the employee will follow the rules and hours of their workplace exactly in order to reduce their efficiency and output; doing no more than their contractual agreement requires.” By The Union of Educational Professionals Work to Rule is a powerful alternative to striking Whilst there is no clear legal definition of industrial action, but it is best described as a concerted action taken by employees against their employer and thus Working to Rule, does constitute industrial action. Almost everyone working in education does far longer hours and greater workload than laid out in their contract, thus working to rule is done to put pressure on the employer in an attempt to achieve a goal without taking strike action. Strike action is a breach of contract as employees will collectively withdraw their labour, but it is not always clear whether other forms of industrial action are a breach of contract. When an employee works to rule, they are working within their contract, but to a minimum e.g. working strictly to a schedule and within their contracted hours, which purposely causes a slowdown in productivity. This is considered less disruptive than other forms of industrial action, and it will make an employee less susceptible to disciplinary action. If an employee works to rule by refusing to carry out their contractual duties, they will be in breach of contract. As certain tasks undertaken by education professionals may not be expressly stated in their contract, but simply implied, it may not be clear if the employee is in breach of contract if they refuse to do those tasks. Refusal to carry out genuinely voluntary duties is not a breach of contract, but it may nevertheless amount to a form of industrial action. Whether or not there is a breach of contract, it is important in relation to pay deductions. If an employee is in breach of contract, their pay will be affected. The general principles are that employees are not entitled to pay for the duration of their strike and that an employee taking industrial action short of a strike, but is in breach of contract have: no entitlement to pay if the employer decides to refuse to accept a partial performance of the contract and tells employees that that they should attend work only when they are prepared to comply fully with their contract, and until they do so, they will not be paid. The employer has to show that the partial performance of the employee has a fundamental impact on their job to do this; and an entitlement to pay where the employer allows them to carry on working and instead makes an appropriate and reasonable deduction from the employee’s pay. | 12/11/21 |
NOVDEC - NC - PolicyTournament: Scarsdale | Round: 2 | Opponent: Lexton AA | Judge: Siegal, Zach Economy DA Hospital DA Hospital Strikes are devastating to public health infrastructure and patient care and sky-rocket costs – hospital strikes are relatively low now but the Plan green-lights more aggressive Strike actions. A total withdrawal of labour, scheduled for later this month, will threaten hospitals’ ability to deliver safe care in areas such as AandE, childbirth and intensive care, according to Prof Sir Bruce Keogh, the national medical director of NHS England. In a strongly worded article in the Observer, Keogh writes that such an escalation of the dispute with the government would be reckless, unethical, a breach of the medical profession’s fundamental duty to “do no harm” and a move that will destroy the public’s trust in doctors. “Despite the fact that consultants will do their best to cover, the fact is that junior doctors are key to the safe and effective running of our NHS. So this new action will put additional, significant strain on AandE, intensive care and maternity services, particularly in smaller hospital,” Keogh explains. “I worry that withdrawal of emergency cover will put our sickest and most vulnerable patients at greater risk. This challenges the ethical framework on which our profession is founded and runs against the grain of our NHS and our personal and professional values”, he adds. Junior doctors are due to refuse to work in any medical setting at all between 8am and 5pm on 26 and 27 April as part of their campaign of industrial action in the bitter and long-running row with Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, over the new contract he intends to impose on them from August. The British Medical Association reacted angrily to Keogh’s intervention. Johann Malawana, the BMA’s junior doctor chair, said: “No junior doctor wants to take this action but we have been left with no choice. They have already done everything else in their power to make their voices heard - protests, marches, petitions, emergency care only strikes. By continuing to ignore them, the government has left them left with no choice. “We regret any disruption caused to patients and have given trusts enough notice for them to plan ahead, and to ensure that senior hospital doctors, GPs and other NHS staff will continue to provide excellent care for patients. Please be assured that should someone need emergency care on a day of action, they will receive it. “It is disappointing that Bruce Keogh is attacking frontline doctors rather than echoing calls, from patients’ groups to senior NHS managers, for the government to get back around the table and end this dispute through talks. In his article, Keogh argues that the continuing series of strikes have caused too much “distress, anxiety and confusion” to patients already through the cancellation of almost 25,000 operations, as a result of four walkouts since January. He says an all-out strike would be “a watershed moment for the NHS”. Keogh is the first senior doctor to articulate in public the warnings that many leaders of the profession have recently given the BMA privately about the danger of patients dying because too few doctors were on duty. Many of the medical royal colleges, which represent different types of doctors professionally, are torn between support for their striking trainees and fear that doctors’ high standing with the public could be ruined if a total withdrawal of cover is seen as a step too far. Hospitals are the critical internal link for pandemic preparedness. 1NR | 12/11/21 |
NOVDEC - NC - Policy V2Tournament: Scarsdale | Round: 4 | Opponent: SouEug KS | Judge: Das, Sreyaash Economy Disadvantage Hospital DA Hospital Strikes are devastating to public health infrastructure and patient care and sky-rocket costs – hospital strikes are relatively low now but the Plan green-lights more aggressive Strike actions. A total withdrawal of labour, scheduled for later this month, will threaten hospitals’ ability to deliver safe care in areas such as AandE, childbirth and intensive care, according to Prof Sir Bruce Keogh, the national medical director of NHS England. In a strongly worded article in the Observer, Keogh writes that such an escalation of the dispute with the government would be reckless, unethical, a breach of the medical profession’s fundamental duty to “do no harm” and a move that will destroy the public’s trust in doctors. “Despite the fact that consultants will do their best to cover, the fact is that junior doctors are key to the safe and effective running of our NHS. So this new action will put additional, significant strain on AandE, intensive care and maternity services, particularly in smaller hospital,” Keogh explains. “I worry that withdrawal of emergency cover will put our sickest and most vulnerable patients at greater risk. This challenges the ethical framework on which our profession is founded and runs against the grain of our NHS and our personal and professional values”, he adds. Junior doctors are due to refuse to work in any medical setting at all between 8am and 5pm on 26 and 27 April as part of their campaign of industrial action in the bitter and long-running row with Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, over the new contract he intends to impose on them from August. The British Medical Association reacted angrily to Keogh’s intervention. Johann Malawana, the BMA’s junior doctor chair, said: “No junior doctor wants to take this action but we have been left with no choice. They have already done everything else in their power to make their voices heard - protests, marches, petitions, emergency care only strikes. By continuing to ignore them, the government has left them left with no choice. “We regret any disruption caused to patients and have given trusts enough notice for them to plan ahead, and to ensure that senior hospital doctors, GPs and other NHS staff will continue to provide excellent care for patients. Please be assured that should someone need emergency care on a day of action, they will receive it. “It is disappointing that Bruce Keogh is attacking frontline doctors rather than echoing calls, from patients’ groups to senior NHS managers, for the government to get back around the table and end this dispute through talks. In his article, Keogh argues that the continuing series of strikes have caused too much “distress, anxiety and confusion” to patients already through the cancellation of almost 25,000 operations, as a result of four walkouts since January. He says an all-out strike would be “a watershed moment for the NHS”. Keogh is the first senior doctor to articulate in public the warnings that many leaders of the profession have recently given the BMA privately about the danger of patients dying because too few doctors were on duty. Many of the medical royal colleges, which represent different types of doctors professionally, are torn between support for their striking trainees and fear that doctors’ high standing with the public could be ruined if a total withdrawal of cover is seen as a step too far. Hospitals are the critical internal link for pandemic preparedness. 1NR Indopak The India-Pakistan conflict will never escalate to nuke war despite their brutal past Climate Change Link turn – strikes hurt the economy which affects all industries: including the green energy sector which is key to solving climate change 2 If there is any change at solving climate change, we need green energy to be able to replace fossil fuel electricity generation but strikes hurt those industries | 12/10/21 |
SEPOCT - Stock NCTournament: SEPOCT | Round: 1 | Opponent: any | Judge: any I negate the resolution, Resolved: The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to reduce intellectual property protections for medicines. Reducing patents doesn’t aid in the accessibility of cheap, generic drugs Access to drugs is one of the fundamental components of the human right to health. It is of specific importance in the context of the introduction of patents on drugs, because patents have the potential both to improve access, by providing incentives for the development of new drugs, and to restrict access, because of the comparatively higher prices of patented drugs. Accessibility generally refers to the idea that health policies should foster the availability of drugs, at affordable prices, to all those who need them. This implies a strong link between lack of access to drugs and poverty. About one-third of the world's population does not have access to basic drugs, a proportion which rises above one-half in the most affected regions of Africa and Asia. Furthermore, a large proportion of people in developing countries do not have access to medical insurance and more often than not pay for drugs themselves. Since price is a major issue in access, it is significant that patented drugs are more expensive than generics. However, patents are not the only factor influencing access, since even cheap generic drugs may not be affordable for people below the poverty line. In these situations access can be ensured only through further measures such as public subsidies or price control measures. The sheer scale of the problem of access to drugs is only too clear in the context of HIV/AIDS. A consortium of international organizations has estimated that fewer than 10 per cent of the people living with HIV/AIDS in developing countries have access to antiretroviral therapy. This proportion goes down to about 0.I percent in Africa. The links among patents, the price of medicines and access to drugs have been taken into consideration by various countries in developing their legal and policy framework in the health sector. India is particularly noteworthy in this respect. As noted above, India adopted patent legislation which prohibited product patents for medicines, and this constituted one of the major incentives for the development of a relatively strong pharmaceutical industry. In the first 25 years after independence, the domestic pharmaceutical industry remained relatively small, and by I970 (the year in which the Patents Act was passed) accounted for only about 25 per cent of the domestic market; but thereafter the restrictions on product patents, prices and foreign investment contributed to the rapid development of the industry, which now accounts for 70 per cent of bulk drugs and meets nearly all the demand for formulations. One of the most important impacts of the Indian Patents Act, prior to its recent TRIPS-related amendments, and the resulting development of a generic pharmaceutical industry has been significantly lower prices for drugs compared to other countries. Indeed, while drug prices in India were among the highest in the world in the initial stages of development, they are now among the lowest. This is not to say that access to drugs is universal-millions still cannot afford basic generic medicines- but the trend since 1970 has definitely been in the right direction. Apart from the exclusion of product patents, the Indian Patents Act introduced further measures to foster access to drugs. With regard to the duration of patent protection, the Act provided specific restrictions in the health sector. While normal patents were granted for 14 years, process patents on drugs or food were granted for only seven years. The Act also provided a strict compulsory licensing regime which included not only compulsory licences but also licences of right. Reducing intellectual property rights results in counterfeit medicine In addition to functioning as a tool to maintain constant innovation in the industry, IP helps reducing counterfeit medicines because medicines that have better technologies and ingredients are more difficult to copy. This means that, through market incentives, the industry manages to have high quality infrastructure, new technology and trained personnel, to create specialized and specific medicines and therapies, which is why they are difficult to replicate. On the other hand, political will functions as another important axis, as it must prosecute those who are making counterfeit medicines. This is achieved through a constant conversation between industry and governments. Therefore, it will be absolutely clear how to identify the authenticity of medicines. In short, IP allows quality standards to be clearer and stricter, and regulators to have greater knowledge and traceability of each product that enters the market. Through IP, you can establish a record of all products globally, which makes it easier to find possible counterfeit medicines. Consequently, the best way to fight counterfeit medicines is through accessing the best quality medicines and for this to happen, an ecosystem between countries, regulators and industry is needed. This ecosystem shall take into account the structural deficiencies of each country and addresses them in a holistic manner, to provide the best quality medicines. In the end, with the Intellectual Property associated with the creation of the product, there are also associated standards of transparency and detailed information that every regulatory agency can access. Moreover, the value chains will receive all this information in order to be aware of the appearance of products that are not registered with the standards of a product protected by IP. Also,IP helps to combat counterfeit medicines internationally, since there are laws that cover all member countries of the United Nations and punish more severely those who commit this crime. Likewise, these laws provide countries with the necessary mechanisms to take concrete action once a counterfeit medicine is discovered. This, of course, must go hand in hand with the political will of each country, because only with collaboration between different actors will it be possible to prosecute the entire chain of counterfeit medicines. Plus, IP owners can receive electronic notifications worldwide more quickly and can take direct communication actions. In a nutshell, IP allows the industry to show the public almost immediately that there is a counterfeit medicine in a country or that a website is selling counterfeit medicines. This is because legally infringing a product protected by IP allows action to be taken to prosecute the counterfeit products. This is especially important for those consumers or small organizations that do not have access to information like a hospital or public health center has. However, it is necessary to involve other actors of the health system so that information about counterfeit medicines reaches remote regions or places, which do not have an internet connection. On the other hand, thanks to IP, the industry is creating specialized safety technology in order for each country to easily identify a drug that comes with a brand but does not belong to that brand. The industry has also used mobile laboratories to test samples of suspected medicines and report them quickly to the value chain. Thus, technology is becoming an important element in fighting this problem. Counterfeit medicines have a wide range of negative effects for different actors and especially for the people who fall victim of them. However, more and more governments and industries are creating concrete actions to pursue the entire chain of counterfeiters, as this is the only way to eradicate the problem all together. The tools to combat counterfeiting exist, the important thing is that actors know how to use them for the benefit of the greatest number of people in the world. Innovation DA IP drives innovation The global economy, including developed and developing nations alike, is becoming more innovation-driven—powered by knowledge, creativity, and technology, each of which is fundamentally supported by intellectual property (IP) and intellectual property rights (IPR) protections. And yet, over the past two decades, the policy debate over IP’s role has come under an increasingly active and coordinated attack, driven by IPR skeptics and opponents hailing from a variety of academic and multilateral institutions, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and some developing nations and policymakers therein. They have done much to advance a false narrative that strong and effective IP is a win-lose, buy-sell proposition, which only helps the developed “North” (as opposed to the underdeveloped “South”). Yet if the international community is going to maximize global innovation—something that is critical if we are to make faster progress on commonly shared global challenges such as climate change, disease prevention and treatment, and economic growth—we will need a stronger and more wide-ranging consensus on the importance of IP to every country throughout the world. To maximize the role intellectual property can play in enabling innovation across the world, the countries that best recognize the essential link between the two—including the United States, Commonwealth nations, European Union members, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and others—need to revise and amplify efforts to build out and strengthen the international framework of intellectual property rules, norms, and cooperation. Intangible assets, such as IP rights, comprised approximately 84 percent of the corporate value of SandP 500 companies in 2018.4 For start-ups, this means much of the capital needed to operate is directly related to IP (see Teal Bio case study for more on this). IP also plays an especially important role for RandD-intensive industries. To take the example of the biopharmaceutical industry, it is characterized by high-risk, time-consuming, and expensive processes including basic research, drug discovery, pre-clinical trials, three stages of human clinical trials, regulatory review, and post-approval research and safety monitoring. The drug development process spans an average of 11.5 to 15 years. For every 5,000 to 10,000 compounds screened on average during the basic research and drug discovery phases, approximately 250 molecular compounds, or 2.5 to 5 percent, make it to preclinical testing. Out of those 250 molecular compounds, approximately 5 make it to clinical testing. That is, 0.05 to 0.1 percent of drugs make it from basic research into clinical trials. Of those rare few which make it to clinical testing, less than 12 percent are ultimately approved for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In addition to high risks, drug development is costly, and the expenses associated with it are increasing. A 2019 report by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions concluded that since 2010 the average cost of bringing a new drug to market increased by 67 percent. Numerous studies have examined the substantial cost of biopharmaceutical RandD, and most confirm investing in new drug development requires $1.7 billion to $3.2 billion up front on average. A 2018 study by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness found similar risks and figures for vaccines, stating, “In general, vaccine development from discovery to licensure can cost billions of dollars, can take over 10 years to complete, and has an average 94 percent chance of failure.” Yet, a 2010 study found that 80 percent of new drugs—that is, the less than 12 percent ultimately approved by the FDA—made less than their capitalized RandD costs. Another study found that only 1 percent (maybe three new drugs each year) of the most successful 10 percent of FDA approved drugs generate half of the profits of the entire drug industry. To say the least, biopharmaceutical RandD represents a high-stakes, long-term endeavor with precarious returns. Without IP protection, biopharmaceutical manufacturers have little incentive to take the risks necessary to engage in the RandD process because they would be unable to recoup even a fraction of the costs incurred. Diminished revenues also result in reduced investments in RandD which means less research into cancer drugs, Alzheimer cures, vaccines, and more. IP rights give life-sciences enterprises the confidence needed to undertake the difficult, risky, and expensive process of life-sciences innovation secure in the knowledge they can capture a share of the gains from their innovations, which is indispensable not only to recouping the up-front RandD costs of a given drug, but which can generate sufficient profits to enable investment in future generations of biomedical innovation and thus perpetuate the enterprises into the future. Covid DA IP is the bedrock upon which today’s COVID-19 vaccines have been built. The technologies they are based on did not come out of thin air at the beginning of the pandemic, but had been under development for decades, with substantial research in academic labs followed by years of risky investment by commercial start-ups. Consider the messenger RNA (mRNA) technology that is the basis for two of the first vaccines approved in Western countries. Scientists discovered in 1961 that mRNA could be used to “reprogram” cells to battle disease. It took decades of lab research and private sector-funded development by startups BioNTech and Moderna to overcome major difficulties and turn the technology into an effective vaccine that can be safely given to patients. Both companies and their investors have spent billions of dollars on mRNA research prior to the pandemic. While academic research is fundamental, the end result would not have been possible without the private sector, which depends on intellectual property rights. Shortly before the pandemic started, we spoke to Dr. Derrick Rossi, the academic founder of Moderna. When asked whether the treatments could be brought from the academic lab to patients without the help of the private sector, Dr. Rossi’s reply was categorical: “Not a chance. Academics are good at academia and fundamental science. They are not good at developing drugs for patients.” Dr. Rossi explains that bringing a drug to market takes many professionals, sharing their labour and diverse expertise. “This industry of professionals is out there… The more people that are involved in the chain, post-academic discovery, the more you have pros involved — all the way from IP filings to VCs to due diligence to assembling a team,” the more likely you are to develop a viable treatment. Developing a practical application for a great academic insight takes vast sums, and investors need some prospect of a return on that investment. As Dr. Rossi explains, “you can be working on the coolest thing, but investors need to know that there is some protection for their investment, plain and simple.” The other claim frequently heard at the beginning of the pandemic was that IP poses a barrier to collaboration and knowledge-sharing, so in a time of emergency any related IP should be open licensed or pooled. In reality, the IP system encouraged the rapid establishment of dozens of partnerships around COVID-19-19, with even commercial rivals prepared to cooperate and share capital and proprietary intellectual resources such as compound libraries. Examples of consortia between the private sector and research centres include the COVID-19-19 Therapeutics Accelerator to evaluate new and repurposed drugs and biologics, the EU-backed Swift COronavirus therapeutics REsponse, Corona Accelerated RandD in Europe (CARE) as well as dozens of bilateral agreements between companies. Indeed, the Pfizer vaccine is the result of its collaboration with BioNtech, where partners shared and combined know-how and proprietary knowledge to create the first vaccine authorized in the U.S. Far from being a barrier to such collaborations, IP is fundamental. Because patent rights require public disclosure, they enable drug developers to identify partners with the right intellectual assets such as know-how, platforms, compounds and technical expertise. Without patents most of this valuable proprietary knowledge would be kept hidden as trade secrets, making it impossible for researchers to know what is out there. Second, the existence of laws protecting intellectual property helps rights-holders make the decision to collaborate in the first place. By allaying concerns about confidentiality, IP enables companies to open up their compound libraries, and to share platform technology and know-how without worrying they are going to sacrifice their wider business objectives or lose control of their valuable assets. For instance, rights holders might contribute IP that is useful for entirely different diseases to COVID-19 collaborations. IP rights and licensing ensure those rights can only be used for the agreed reason, preventing competitors freeriding to gain an unfair advantage in other areas. As the former Director General of WIPO noted in June 2020, the main challenge at the time was “not access to vaccines, treatments or cures for COVID-19-19, but the absence of any approved vaccines, treatments or cures to have access to. The policy focus of governments at this stage should therefore be on supporting science and innovation”. During this initial phase of the pandemic, the majority of governments followed this advice, especially by not threatening to remove IP of products yet to be invented. No government from a country with a significant life-science RandD industry, for instance, backed the WHO’s “Solidarity Call to Action” in which companies were asked to unilaterally cede IP and data related to COVID-19 to its new technology and IP pool, C-TAP. The WHO embarked on this initiative with no evidence that IP would stand in the way of RandD and access efforts, distracting efforts away from more practical initiatives that stood greater chance of success. Intellectual property has the power to bring about vital medical innovation. It creates access to new treatments which in turn creates healthy populations. It can support people’s lives and their livelihoods. What approach to encouraging innovation should we take instead? How do we incentivize drug makers to undertake the hefty RandD costs to develop new vaccines without giving them exclusive rights over their production and sale? The most effective approach during a public health crisis is direct government support: public funding of RandD, advance purchase commitments by the government to buy large numbers of doses at set prices, and other, related payouts. And when we pay drug makers, we should not hesitate to pay generously, even extravagantly: we want to offer drug companies big profits so that they prioritize this work above everything else, and so that they are ready and eager to come to the rescue again the next time there’s a crisis. It was direct support via Operation Warp Speed that made possible the astonishingly rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines and then facilitated a relatively rapid rollout of vaccine distribution (relative, that is, to most of the rest of the world). And it’s worth noting that a major reason for the faster rollout here and in the United Kingdom compared to the European Union was the latter’s misguided penny-pinching. The EU bargained hard with firms to keep vaccine prices low, and as a result their citizens ended up in the back of the queue as various supply line kinks were being ironed out. This is particularly ironic since the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was developed in Germany. As this fact underscores, the chief advantage of direct support isn’t to “get tough” with drug firms and keep a lid on their profits. Instead, it is to accelerate the end of the public health emergency by making sure drug makers profit handsomely from doing the right thing. Patent law and direct support should be seen not as either-or alternatives but as complements that apply different incentives to different circumstances and time horizons. Patent law provides a decentralized system for encouraging innovation. The government doesn’t presume to tell the industry which new drugs are needed; it simply incentivizes the development of whatever new drugs that pharmaceutical firms can come up with by offering them a temporary monopoly. It is important to note that patent law’s incentives offer no commercial guarantees. Yes, you can block other competitors for a number of years, but that still doesn’t ensure enough consumer demand for the new product to make it profitable. The situation is different in a pandemic. Here the government knows exactly what it wants to incentivize: the creation of vaccines to prevent the spread of a specific virus and other drugs to treat that virus. Under these circumstances, the decentralized approach isn’t good enough. There is no time to sit back and let drug makers take the initiative on their own timeline. Instead, the government needs to be more involved to incentivize specific innovations now. As recompense for letting it call the shots (pardon the pun), the government sweetens the deal for drug companies by insulating them from commercial risk. If pharmaceutical firms develop effective vaccines and therapies, the government will buy large, predetermined quantities at prices set high enough to guarantee a healthy return. For the pharmaceutical industry, it is useful to conceive of patent law as the default regime for innovation promotion. It improves pharmaceutical companies’ incentives to develop new drugs while leaving them free to decide which new drugs to pursue – and also leaving them to bear all commercial risk. In a pandemic or other emergency, however, it is appropriate to shift to the direct support regime, in which the government focuses efforts on one disease. In this regime, it is important to note, the government provides qualitatively superior incentives to those offered under patent law. Not only does it offer public funding to cover the up-front costs of drug development, but it also provides advance purchase commitments that guarantee a healthy return. It should therefore be clear that the pharmaceutical industry has no legitimate basis for objecting to a TRIPS waiver. Since, because of the public health crisis, drug makers now qualify for the superior benefits of direct government support, they no longer need the default benefits of patent support. Arguments that a TRIPS waiver would deprive drug makers of the incentives they need to keep developing new drugs, when they are presently receiving the most favorable incentives available, can be dismissed as the worst sort of special pleading. That said, it is a serious mistake to try to cast the current crisis as a morality play in which drug makers wear the black hats and the choice at hand is between private profits and public health. We would have no chance of beating this virus without the formidable organizational capabilities of the pharmaceutical industry, and providing the appropriate incentives is essential to ensure that the industry plays its necessary and vital role. It is misguided to lament that private companies are profiting in the current crisis: those profits are a drop in the bucket compared to the staggering cost of this pandemic in lives and economic damage. Waiving IP protections for medicines such as the Covid-19 vaccine undermines responses to combat the disease Compulsory Licenses DA The pharmaceutical industry is increasingly looking towards emerging markets, where demand for new drugs is rising rapidly alongside rates of chronic disease. But in recent years India, known as the “pharmacy of the developing world,” has led the battle for affordable drugs, using legal mechanisms to overturn patents so that its generic drug companies (which produce a fifth of the world’s generic drugs) can undercut the Western giants. Developing countries have followed India’s example, and battles over patent protection and prices have broken out from Indonesia to Brazil. The fight echoes the one over access to treatments for HIV infection a decade or two ago, but it is now being fought over a far wider range of drugs with greater financial implications for Western drug companies. In a series of high profile court cases, India has rejected several patent claims for cancer drugs and Roche decided in August not to pursue a patent application for its breast cancer drug trastuzumab (Herceptin) because it viewed it as a losing battle in India’s current intellectual property environment. A key decision came in 2012, when India issued a compulsory licence for Bayer’s cancer drug sorafenib (Nexavar), allowing a local company Natco to produce a generic version. A compulsory licence allows a company to produce a patented product without the consent of the patent owner. Under the World Trade Organization’s trade related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS) agreement countries are free to grant compulsory licences in the interest of public health; however, there is much argument about how this is defined. The Indian courts ruled that the costs of $4500 (£2700; €3300) a month for sorafenib were unaffordable to the Indian government. A generic version of the drug is now available for $175 a month. Since that decision a further two applications for compulsory licences have been rejected. But the Indian government has set up an expert committee to review drug patents and identify whether any additional compulsory licences should be issued. The drug industry fears that the floodgates will open and that this will create an “innovation crisis.” Andrew Jenner, executive director of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, said: “Increased use of compulsory licensing provisions will reduce the incentive to invest in the research and development of new medicines in India and should be seen as a last resort as open discussions with patent holders often lead to successful outcomes.” | 11/13/21 |
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12/11/21 | papageorgioui@bxscienceedu |
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12/11/21 | papageorgioui@bxscienceedu |
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