A month after the 140th World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Executive Board meeting, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) response has revealed that the United States government had opposed including agenda items proposed by India, which aimed at reforming medical innovation that currently pump up drug prices to unaffordable levels.
The Indian government — along with 11 South East Asian countries — had proposed a discussion on an ‘Access to Medicines’ report by the United Nations High Level Panel that had recommended reforms in the funding of biomedical research and development.
However, the set of documents released by Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), a not for profit organisation that gives technical advice to governments, reveals that both the United States and the WHO opposed including the proposal by India.
Email exchange
An email exchange dated September 28, 2016, between Dr. Thomas Frieden, CDC Director and Vice-Chairman of the WHO EB, and Ambassador Jimmy Kolker, Assistant Secretary for Global Affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, sets out the position of the U.S. government, stating that, “Access to medicines (oppose proposal by India): The USG should be on the record opposing this proposal from India that seeks to take forward recommendations from in the U.N. Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Access to Medicines report, which was released in September. We have serious concerns about the narrow mandate of the Panel and its recommendations ... ”
The 11 member-states — Bangladesh, Bhutan, South Korea, India, Indonesia, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Timor-Leste — as well as Brazil, Iran, and South Africa supported the inclusion of the agenda item.
The delays by WHO to place the UN HLP recommendations on the agenda of the WHO’s EB and subsequently at the World Health Assembly have drawn widespread criticism from Asian civil society organisations.
“The U.N. report says there is a need for an RD treaty and it recommended reforms in the area of biomedical R&D. The U.S. government has a policy of blocking all reforms that would lead to funding the R&D system in a way that it prioritises diseases that kill million of people in the developing world. The U.S. government is not just a member-state of WHO but also a big donor. This is consistent with the U.S. policy to pressure countries like India to have more IP barriers while blocking all attempts at reforms,” said Leena Menghaney, lawyer and access campaigner.
Policy incoherence
The U.N. Access to Medicines report had recommended solutions for remedying the policy incoherence between justifiable rights of inventors, trade rules and global public health targets. The report recommended that “governments and the private sector must refrain from explicit or implicit threats, tactics or strategies that undermine the right of WTO Members to use TRIPS flexibilities.”
On March 1, India delivered a statement during WTO TRIPS Council discussions on the Access to Medicines report, urging member-states to discuss the report’s recommendations.
