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Evergreening patents on medical products – extending the lifespan of patents that are about to expire – is an “abuse of the intellectual property system”, an HIV activist told the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Fair Pricing Forum on Thursday.

Meanwhile, an industry representative laid out her company’s value-based, country-specific approach to improving access to medicines, providing an example of how it had improved access to cancer medicine in Nigeria.

Ukraine-based Sergiy Kondratyuk, who works for the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition, said that evergreening is pervasive and a barrier to lower medicine prices.

“In Thailand, about 70-80% of drug patents are evergreened … and approximately 45% were evergreened Ukraine,” said Kondratyuk.

The 4th WHO Fair Pricing Forum took place from 6 – 8 February 2024. Ellen ‘t Hoen spoke at the opening plenary. Below are her speaker notes.

I started working on medicines pricing in the late nineties, with Médecins sans Frontières. At the time, medicines to treat HIV/AIDS had begun to turn the deadly disease into a chronic one. But only for people living with HIV in the North; elsewhere in the world, people with HIV died. 

Antiretroviral medicines needed to treat the disease had a price tag of 10,000 to 15,000 USD per person per year and were out of reach of most people. But their actual cost of production was modest: once generic manufacturers brought ARVs to the market in the early 2000s, prices fell more than 90%. 

The following elements made this happen:

The United States and Paraguay, on behalf of the Cairns Group of farm- exporting countries, seemingly clashed with the European Union, Switzerland, and Japan on 6 February over negotiating the mandate on domestic support and market access in agriculture, which is expected to be agreed upon, barring opposition, at the World Trade Organization’s 13^th ministerial conference (MC13) beginning in Abu Dhabi in three weeks’ time, said people familiar with the discussions.

The chair of the Doha fisheries subsidies negotiations on 5 February acknowledged that despite “constructive engagement” during the last several days, “some significant divergences in positions and overall approach still remain” on various issues concerning subsidies contributing to overcapacity and overfishing (OCOF) ahead of the World Trade Organization’s 13th ministerial conference (MC13) beginning in Abu Dhabi on 26 February.

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As previously reported in the SUNS, many developing countries seem to be sharply concerned over how the large subsidizers contributing to OCOF are going to be allowed to continue with their subsidies under seemingly weak two-stage sustainability criteria, as well as the alleged failure to include the issue of distant-water fishing in the list of prohibited subsidies.

The Bureau of the Working Group on the Amendment of International Health Regulations (WGIHR) rejected the WHO Secretariat’s proposal to delete equity-related amendment proposals (Article 13 A, Article 44 A and Annex 10).

The WGIHR Bureau did not circulate the Secretariat’s proposals as the Bureau’s text.

Three concepts – The Right to Healthcare, Universal Health Coverage (UHC) and Primary Health Care (PHC) – are all globally accepted as essential principles in the construction of health systems. It is important, however, to delineate how these concepts relate to each other and the variance with which the terms themselves are defined as well as the relationship among and between them as they come to be established in different strands of health policy discourse. This is important because the three terms are often either taken up as independent strategies (with various pathways) or placed in subordinate, linear, conflicting or contradictory relationships rather than first understanding each one clearly and then building up a relational perspective.

With only 10 official negotiating days left, the Working Group on Amendments to the International Health Regulations (WGIHR) is under pressure to reach agreement on changes to the rules that govern global health emergencies.

The seventh WGIHR meeting which began on Monday officially kicked off the 2024 pandemic ‘season’ negotiations at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva.

It’s a short, intense season though, with the grand finale for both the IHR amendments and the pandemic accord set for the May World Health Assembly.

As Eswatini pointed out, the WGIHR only has 10 official negotiating days left until May, and by Friday, this time will be halved. 

Addressing the equity-related gaps in health emergencies should be prioritised, stressed Eswatini, speaking for the 47 African member states and Egypt (part of WHO’s Eastern Mediterranean region).

The Global Context: One of the big events in the global health policy in the coming year is the United Nations High Level Meeting on Antimicrobial Resistance scheduled for September 2024 [1]. There is undeniable merit in categorizing antimicrobial resistance as one of the top-ten global threats, and the proposed breadth and urgency of action are highly required.

Conflict has become an integral part of the global health discourse. It is therefore not surprising that as the premier organization to govern health, WHO has had to find ways to navigate messy geopolitics.

In today’s edition, our final story from the recently concluded WHO Executive Board meeting, we bring you up to speed with WHO’s Global Health and Peace Initiative.

The context in which this discussion is unfolding is striking given the simultaneous conflicts in different parts of the world. But laid over the complex dynamics in global health, these conflicts serve to bring into clarity where member states of WHO stand in relation to each other, and in relation to the mandate of the WHO.

Major funders of WHO, are also masters on the geopolitical chess board. But this contradiction does not sit well on the ground, such as in Gaza, for example.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) have an opportunity at the 13th Ministerial Conference (MC13) in February 2024 to grant an extension to the much-embattled Waiver to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). The Waiver, proposed more than three years ago, was intended to allow countries and their pharmaceutical firms to manufacture and distribute generic versions of COVID-19 products to their populations more freely.

Recently, the international community quietly passed by the 22nd anniversary of the conclusion of the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health in November 2023. The Doha Declaration, originally adopted at the insistence of the Africa Group, was a landmark moment in international cooperation in which the members of the WTO agreed (in principle) that public health should not be undermined by a narrow reading of global rules governing intellectual property (IP).