http://www.finfacts.com/irelandbusinessnews/publish/article_10003581.shtmlThe NYT also reports that Roche, the maker of the main drug that would be used against a possible bird flu epidemic, is under growing pressure to allow production of generic versions of the medicine.
But the company and some outside experts say production of the drug, Tamiflu, is so complex and time-consuming that even generic makers could not quickly expand global supplies. Those putting pressure on Roche, a Swiss company, include the head of the United Nations and health officials in some nations. They are asking whether the health of hundreds of millions of people in a possible pandemic should depend on the efficiency and productivity of a single corporation.
Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the United Nations, raised the issue last Thursday during a little-noticed visit to the Geneva headquarters of the World Health Organization, a United Nations agency. Mr. Annan stopped short of calling for compulsory licensing by Roche, but spoke broadly about the need to make sure intellectual property did not get in the way of ensuring the availability not only of Tamiflu but also of vaccines at prices that poor people could afford. Dr. Kou Hsu-sung, the director general of Taiwan's Center for Disease Control, was even more critical, saying that Taiwanese scientists knew how to make Tamiflu and were trying to balance respect for Roche's intellectual property with Taiwan's national security. "We are disappointed that W.H.O. refused to press Roche to make it a generic in a situation like this," he said. Dr. Kuo said Tueseay morning that Roche was overstating the difficulty of Tamiflu production and that Taiwanese government scientists had devised a way to begin mass production quickly. "Within a couple months, we can do that if we solve the problem" of patent protection, he said, adding that Taiwan was consulting lawyers and considering whether to offer compensation if it produced the drug without permission.
But the head of the W.H.O.'s global influenza program, in a speech in San Francisco on the same day that Mr. Annan was visiting the agency's headquarters, said that generic manufacture of Tamiflu could not happen quickly because the production process was too complex. "There will be no way in the next two years a company would be able to produce generic Tamiflu," said the W.H.O. official, Klaus Stöhr, speaking at the annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. But he also said that
even if Roche produced Tamiflu at full capacity for the next 10 years, and the drug was stockpiled, there would be enough at the end of that period for only 20 percent of the world's population. <snip>
The drug industry's main lobbying group in Washington, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America - of which Roche is a member - issued a statement Monday opposing such a move.
"Public health officials should not consider imposing compulsory licenses on avian flu medicines, a step that would take away incentives for other companies to undertake the difficult and costly work of searching for new antivirals and vaccines for this possible health crisis," the group's president, Billy Tauzin, said in the statement. Roche's enthusiasm now for expanding production is in contrast with its position in the summer of 2004, when Tamiflu sales were a fraction of the current level and the company had only one small factory in Switzerland producing the drug. At the time Roche rebuffed public pleas from prominent epidemiologists, like Dr. Arnold Monto at the University of Michigan, to commit the money for the immediate construction of additional factories.
more....
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