Yesterday, fifteen House Democrats sent a letter to Ambassador Michael Froman at the United States Trade Representative to express serious concern that the United States officials have been pressuring Colombia to abandon the process of issuing a compulsory license on imatinib. The letter can be read here.
The 2016 USTR Special 301 report is now available. (copy here). The report is 77 pages of complaints about intellectual property policies around the world, plus a number of other complaints, including those related to pricing and reimbursement of pharmaceutical drugs and medical devices, restrictions on data flows, standard setting, and government procurement.
On the one hand, USTR says it is supports “access to medicine for all.”
This is a slightly expanded version of the testimony we provided at the March 1, 2016 USTR Special 301 hearing. I had some trouble uploading to Regulations.Gov, but emailed a copy to Christine R. Peterson, the Director for Intellectual Property and Innovation. One addition was this data:
(An expanded, edited and better version of this is available in our March 4, 2016 reply comment to USTR, available here: https://www.keionline.org/node/2440)
These were my notes from my testimony for KEI at today’s USTR Special 301 hearing
Big market puts countries on the #special301 watch list
The dearth of recent compulsory licenses out of India has led to speculation that the Government has made an agreement not to issue such licenses.
On reviewing submissions for the Office of the United States Trade Representative’s upcoming 2016 Special 301 Review, several industry documents confirm that such an agreement exists.
The submission by the United States Chamber of Commerce’s Global Intellectual Property Center states:
KEI is one of the non-government entities speaking at the USTR Special 301 hearing on Tuesday. We each get 7 minutes of testimony and 3 minutes of questions. (The schedule is here).
On Tuesday October 20, 2015, Representative Anna Eshoo (D-CA), one of the principal authors of the Biologic Price Competition and Innovation Act (BPCIA), sent a letter to the United States Trade Representative requesting timely clarification regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s impact “on existing U.S. laws that limit damages for infringement of intellectual property (IP) rights, and on the potential ISDS ramifications for those conflicts.”
On Wednesday, October 14, 2015, KEI staff and members of Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines team demonstrated outside of the White House and USTR, urging the administration, especially USTR and Ambassador Michael Froman, to support a request for a permanent drug patent waiver for Least Developed Countries (LDCs) at the WTO.
Below are images from the protest action, also available in higher resolution here. And, yes, you can use these photos under any creative commons or wikimedia license.
Attached is a letter, dated October 14, 2015, from Senator Sherrod Brown to USTR’s Ambassador Michael Froman, urging USTR to support a permanent waiver of WTO drug patent rules, for Least Developed Countries. Negotiations on this issue begin formally on October 15, 2015, during a meeting of the WTO TRIPS Council.
Among the money quotes: