Improving Access To Medicines Doesn't Have To Mean More Patents

Luigi Palombi, Australian National University

Abstract

Access to medicines presupposes that there are medicines to access, but the development of medicines, especially those needed to treat diseases that inflict the poor and the disadvantaged, are especially difficult to access because of the pharmaceutical industry’s paradigm of medicines being inextricably linked to patents; meaning, without patents there is no incentive to undertake the necessary R&D to develop new medicines. This paper argues that this is a lie; told by pharmaceutical executives and spread by well meaning scientists. Uncontested by policymakers in the 1960’s it has become a truth that threatens scientific progress, the development of appropriate medicines and access to medicines for all but those that can afford them.