The end of the pandemic seemingly relies on drug companies who will decide who lives or dies, as they control access to who gets the cure. This is not like some perfect ending as some would expect.
Mostly this will be how everything pans out and it might not be for the better. There will be a treatment to arise, but how accessible will it be for everyone is the biggest question to answer.
To make it worse, COVID-19 will be no exemption from all pandemics. There will be a battle for the patents for vaccines and treatments, where an entity will get more from the honey pot. Big pharma will decide who lives or dies, as patent holders.
Monopolies control commodities and can be sued with anti-trust laws. Medical patients are legalized monopolies, where patents for medicines are given as rewards top pharma for research and development, not outright ownership of the patent.
Patents for medicines should last for 20 years, but constant enhancements to the patent will add extensions that give the power to control the market. It sets in motion, foreclosing market competition and setting prices determined by them.
HIV/Aids treatment was developed in the U.S. by several pharma in 1996, using a combo of "antiretroviral medicines, turned a virus that was a death sentence into a chronic condition."
Discovering the cure was a relief for many HIV sufferers but the downside is the expense involved in the treatment since not all have the patent for the medicines.
For example, the price of the HIV treatment is annually at £6,500 per person, in parts of the world, it was also the price of not getting treated for the condition. Until 2004, the treatment was expensive but became affordable then.
The coronavirus epidemic laid bare these monopolies that are purposely limiting access to coronavirus therapies. Lack of N95 respirator masks is an artificially induced shortage that is not so obvious, 3M holds the 400 patents needed to produce them outside 3M's facilities, and who can supply or produce them in the US.
In some cases, politicians are asking 3M to give access to their patents to increase production, but no response. With the shortage of testing kits for COVID-19, a French diagnostic manufacturer submitted a test kit to the U.S. FDA for emergency approval in the U.S. to sell it, but they got sued for patent infringement by Softbank though it was withdrawn later.
Patents are holding back a COVID-19 drug
All of the drugs like favipiravir, lopinavir, ritonavir, sold under Kaletra have short term patents restricting production to the mother companies.
Another is remdesivir that is owned by Gilead has a patent until 2038. Gilead tried to designate remdesivir as an orphan drug but backed out because COVID-19 is a rare disease.
All of these drugs in testing have patents that give their companies control over pricing and production. This is one concern when a cure for COVID-19 is deveoped. There's also a question of who controls production and pricing of the cure.
Countries are pooling resources to develop a cure that is not controlled by patents, one example is the UNITAID that is pledging to finance it. A COVID-19 cure must be free from pharma monopolies to reach everyone or it will be at the behest of a few companies.
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