-Newsclick.in The recent agreements between Medicine Patent Pool and Big Pharma are being projected as benevolent gestures from pharma companies in sharing their patented technologies with other countries. The fact is it is working towards cementing its monopoly power further. The development of anti-viral oral pills to combat COVID-19 will, hopefully, make the fight against the pandemic more promising. While Merck has developed the anti-viral pill Molnupiravir, Pfizer has come up with...

-Financial Express If patents continue to determine global access to vaccines and drugs, then fighting Covid-19 will remain a distant dream for most countries Vaccines are badly required by the world, as are drugs like Remdesivir and Tocilizumab, and medical equipment like ventilators and oxygen concentrators. A large number of countries, particularly low- and middle-income ones, are struggling to access vaccines, drugs and equipment. There cannot be a more important occasion than the...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The health ministry was actively mulling compulsory licensing, apart from price capping, of “orphan drugs” (for rare diseases), when the department of pharmaceuticals abruptly issued an order exempting such medicines from price control, derailing plans to make these drugs affordable. The health ministry discussed price capping and invoking compulsory licence for these “exorbitantly” priced “orphan drugs” at a meeting on January 3, the day when DoP...

-The Hindu India must counter Japan’s U.S.-style pressure at the RCEP talks and ensure affordable generic medicines Leaked texts are like leaked gases — you may never find the one responsible for it, but the mayhem caused by its release is hard to contain. Unsurprisingly, all public discussions on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) are centred around leaked documents. As India negotiates the RCEP — a free trade agreement that looks...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Doctors and public health groups have come together to suggest that the government should phase out branded drugs in a calibrated manner and ban differential pricing under different brands to promote generic drug prescriptions. This comes in the wake of PM Narendra Modi's announcement that the government was working on a legal framework to ensure that doctors mandatorily prescribed low cost generic medicines. Following the PM's...