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INTERVENTION BY Médecins Sans Frontières

126th WHO Executive Board, Agenda Item 4.3
Public health, innovation and intellectual property: global strategy and plan of action

Speaker: Michelle Childs, Director of Policy and Advocacy for the Access Campaign

Thank you Chair.
 
Médecins Sans Frontières will focus our comments on the executive summary of the report from the WHO Expert Working Group on R&D Financing.

We wish to highlight a number of areas of concern in relation to the analysis and recommendations in the Executive Summary.  In particular, it does not build on the conclusions of the CIPIH report and the Global Strategy and Plan of Action in key areas, such as the need to develop proposals for financing mechanisms that delink the costs of R&D from the price of health products to deliver both innovation and access.

It appears to endorse the role of intellectual property as an incentive for research. This goes against the findings of the CIPIH report, which clearly found that intellectual property fails as a tool to stimulate R&D for diseases affecting millions of poor people in developing countries, and acts as a barrier to accessing life-saving medicines.

The criteria used to select and evaluate the proposals appear not to have been changed, despite the flaws which favoured the status quo, identified by civil society and Member States in the public hearing. The Global Strategy aims to promote new thinking. The summary’s recommendations however predominantly favour those organisations and companies currently involved in R&D, and assume that they should be the focus of designing a new system and will be the main beneficiaries of proposals.

It has discarded proposals that seek to delink the cost of R&D from the price of health tools, and proposals from Member States and civil society that suggest new norms for the coordination and funding of R&D .

We are also concerned, as others, about the process, as it is reported that representatives from the pharmaceutical industry appear to have had early access to confidential documents, and had the opportunity to potentially influence the recommendations now before the EB.  

Such events and flaws cast doubt on the validity of the summary’s review of proposals, and on the approach the EWG has taken. We note the proposals to review the full report and support those proposals, to assess whether it is consistent with the Global Strategy and Plan of Action, and if necessary to amend the selection criteria to ensure consistency with the direction given by the CIPIH and the Global Strategy.  

However we note that the implementation of the Global Strategy should not be delayed, and we urge Member States and WHO to lead on a pro-health approach to priority setting and financing of R&D and the management of intellectual property.

Thank you Chair.