Tournament: Plano Senior Clark TFA Invitational | Round: 1 | Opponent: Rock Hill LM | Judge: Ashley Rihani
I affirm the resolution “Resolved: that The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to reduce intellectual property protections for medicines.”
The value is morality because the word “ought” in the resolution indicates a moral obligation.
The value criterion is maximizing expected well-being, which means causing the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people.
There are two main reasons for this:
1) Everyone does not like painful or emotionally harmful experiences, so naturally we should try to replace these things with good experiences.
2) Things like death and oppression are intuitively bad, and affect everyone, so we should try to prevent them.
In summary, if I can prove to you that reducing intellectual property protections would have a good impact on the world, then you should vote for the affirmative in today’s debate.
IP includes patents, copyrights, trademarks, etc.
WIPO No Date World Intellectual Property Organization, UN agency that specifically deals with IP law, No date, "What is Intellectual Property (IP)?," WIPO, https://www.wipo.int/about-ip/en//Kankee
Case
We’ve all been affected by COVID and know that a solution needs to occur. We have one. Reductions in IP protections are necessary for developing countries to make enough covid vaccines so that our situation gets better.
Tai 21 Tai, Katherine. “A Patent Waiver on COVID Vaccines Is Right and Fair.” Nature News, Nature Publishing Group, 25 May 2021, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01242-1./dhsNJ
While companies are monopolizing the vaccine in developed countries, people are increasingly becoming more and more affected by the disease in other countries like Bangladesh, India, and more. Many companies have the factories necessary, but they can’t afford to develop the vaccine due to the fear of being sued under a patent.
Lerner and Fang 21 Sharon Lerner, Investigative Reporter at The Intercept covering health, science, and the environment, Lee Fang, contributing writer at The Nation with a BA in government and politics from the University of Maryland, 04-29-2021, https://theintercept.com/2021/04/29/covid-vaccine-factory-production-ip/?
The impact of not voting affirmative is millions of people in developing countries dying due to vaccine inequality. It’s unethical to do nothing when we know that there is a solution to saving millions and millions of lives.
Lennard 21 Natasha Lennard, educator of Critical Journalism at the New School for Social Research and Contributing Writer for the Intercept, 6-11-2021, "The G7 Upheld Vaccine Apartheid. Officials From the “Global South” Are Pushing Back.," Intercept, https://theintercept.com/2021/06/17/vaccine-g7-covid-internationalism-summit//Kankee
While patents first-glance may seem like a good idea, the problem is that many corporations use them to get rid of rivals, functionally monopolizing the market. As a result, medical innovation has slowed down tremendously.
Gubby 19 Hellen Gubby, professor at the Rotterdam School of Management at Amarus University with a PhD in law, 9-6-2019, "Is the Patent System a Barrier to Inclusive Prosperity? The Biomedical Perspective," Wiley Online Library, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1758-5899.12730/Kankee
Empirics prove our thesis– up to 80 of all new patents are not new drugs but old ones.
Feldman 18 Robin Feldman 18, May your drug price be evergreen, Journal of Law and the Biosciences, Volume 5, Issue 3, December 2018, Pages 590–647, https://doi.org/10.1093/jlb/lsy022 Arthur J. Goldberg Distinguished Professor of Law, Albert Abramson ’54 Distinguished Professor of Law Chair, and Director of the Center for Innovation (Study Notes: Presenting the first comprehensive study of evergreening, this article examines the extent to which evergreening behavior—which can be defined as artificially extending the protection cliff—may contribute to the problem. The author analyses all drugs on the market between 2005 and 2015, combing through 60,000 data points to examine every instance in which a company added a new patent or exclusivity.)sid
These anticompetitive practices allow major corporations to charge artificially outrageous costs that prevents consumers from affording medicine and drugs that they need. This is especially true in the context of other countries. Studies indicates that generic medicines are unavailable and up to 80 of people are pushed under the poverty line.
Hoban 10 Rose Hoban 9-13-2010 "High Cost of Medicine Pushes More People into Poverty" https://www.voanews.com/science-health/high-cost-medicine-pushes-more-people-poverty (spent more than six years as the health reporter for North Carolina Public Radio – WUNC, where she covered health care, state health policy, science and research with a focus on public health issues. She left to start North Carolina Health News after watching many of her professional peers leave or be laid off of their jobs, leaving NC with few people to cover this complicated and important topic. ALSO cites Laurens Niens who is a Health Researcher at Erasmus University Rotterdam)Elmer, poor government policies can drive up the cost of medications. "For instance, a lot of governments actually tax medicines when they come into the country," he says. "They have no standard for the markups on medicines through the distribution chain. So often, governments think they pay a good price for the medicines when they procure them from the producer. However, before such a medicine reaches a patient, markups are sometimes up to 1,000 percent."
Current patent protection makes insulin, an essential drug for many, unaffordable – that causes diabetics to skip/ration doses, skimp on necessities, or die trying.
Barker 20 Erin M Barker, Executive Editor at the Campbell Law Review with a JD, 2020, "When Market Forces Fail: The Case for Federal Regulation of Insulin Prices," Campbell Law Review, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/camplr42andi=331/Kankee
Patents allow a “government sanctioned monopoly” on insulin – Studies prove that looser IP laws would substantially decrease the cost of insulin and that research and manufacturing costs are extremely low right now
Johnson 18 Judith A. Johnson, Specialist in Biomedical Science Policy at Congressional Research Service with an MS in molecular biology from Yale, 11-19-2018, “Insulin Products and the Cost of Diabetes Treatment,” Congressional Research Service, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/IF11026.pdf/Kankee
Reducing IP protection for insulin also increases innovation – it stops redundant research and competition by allowing other companies to innovate similar medicines and sell them for a lower cost which makes it affordable to many.
Emily 20 Emily Hanson, JD Candidate at the University of Georgia School of Law, 2020, “Economic Burdens of Life: Trade Secrecy and the Insulin Pricing Crisis in the United States,” Journal of Intellectual Property Law, https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1457andcontext=jipl/Kankee