KEI comments to IGWG2

8 November 2007

KEI appreciates the opportunity to speak today. Our comments will focus on 3 items.

1. Transparency

We object to the fact that NGOs are not allowed to sit in the galleries and listen to the drafting sessions. Please open these meetings up. The facilities allow for this. They have galleries, which are used in the annual WHA meeting. But our thanks to the Chairman and Howard Zucker for their assistance in ensuring that we have WIFI for the events.

2. IPR

The 2001 Doha Declaration said intellectual property rules should be implemented to promote access to medicine for all. One should assume this is a serious norm, and actually implement it. Any end product should be consistent with access, not only for neglected diseases, but for anything that causes suffering or death in developing countries.

3. Money

WHA 59.24 asks the IGWG to draw up a global strategy and plan of action, and, among other things aiming to secure "an enhanced and sustainable basis for needs-driven, essential health research," including proposing "clear objectives and priorities for research and development, and estimating funding needs in this area."

Let's talk about money.

While we don't like closed lists of diseases, we note that we have seen lists with 3, 8 11, 13, 14 or 23 diseases. If you need more than one treatment or each disease, you are talking about very large sums of money.

TAG has just released a report that calls for annual investments of $2 billion, just for TB. There are those that want large investments in treatments malaria, an AIDS vaccine, and the many neglected diseases that have been identified as having inadequate treatments.

How much are we talking about $5 to $10 billion, per year? More?

Where will this money come from? It is more than the Gates Foundation can provide. It is more than one will obtain from private donations. It will largely come from governments, and their taxpayers.

We hope the funding for priority research is large enough to do much. When subsides of this size are involved, there will have to be a serious conversation about many topics, including, who will manage money, who will make the decisions on it's use?

Will the money be spent locally or globally?

What conditions if any, will come with the funding, as it relates to access?

Will the IGWG connect the "I" innovation policies with the "a" access policies, so we have an "i+a" outcome.

How much of the money will be put into "push" mechanisms, such as the grants that current sustain many of the academic and non-profit product development projects? How much money will be placed into "pull" mechanisms? Since we cannot offer high consumer prices as an incentives, will the IGWG examine a de-linking of R&D incentives from prices, as was anticipated by WHA60.30, by using prizes to reward successful investors, in cases where high prices are an entirely inappropriate incentive, because the treatment is for poor people.

This meeting is the beginning of this debate, and we look forward to further participation.