Labour will take on pharmaceutical companies and put public health before private profit - Corbyn

 

 

Jeremy Corbyn raised the case of Luis Walker, a nine-year-old boy he met on Monday who is living with cystic fibrosis and is being denied the medicine he needs – Orkambi – because its manufacturer refuses to sell the drug to the NHS for an affordable price. The Labour leader attacked the pharmaceutical industry and drug companies for putting “profits for shareholders before people’s lives” in the case of Luis and thousands of others suffering from illnesses such as cystic fibrosis, hepatitis C and breast cancer.

 

Speaking at Labour Party Conference, the Labour leader launched ‘Medicines for the Many’, a radical programme of reforms to make life-changing drugs available at affordable prices and create a health innovation system that will put public health before private profit.

 

Promising to take on the big pharmaceutical companies which deny life-saving and life-changing medicines to ill patients by charging extortionate prices, the Labour Leader announced plans to secure generic versions of patented medicines at a price that is affordable for the NHS, make public funding for research conditional on the result drugs being priced affordably for all and create a new, publicly-owned generic drugs manufacturer to supply cheaper medicines to our NHS.

 

Raising the case of Luis Walker, Jeremy Corbyn said:

 

“Yesterday I met Luis Walker, a nine-year-old boy who is living with cystic fibrosis. Every day he needs at least four hours of treatment and is often in hospital, keeping him from school and his friends.  

 

“Luis’s life could be very different with the aid of a medicine called Orkambi. But Luis is denied the medicine he needs because its manufacturer refuses to sell the drug to the NHS for an affordable price.  

 

“Luis, and tens of thousands of others suffering from illnesses like cystic fibrosis, hepatitis C, and breast cancer, are being denied life-saving medicines by a system that puts profits for shareholders before people’s lives.”

 

Announcing the reforms in his speech at Labour Party conference, Jeremy Corbyn said:

 

“We will redesign the system to serve public health not private wealth using compulsory licensing to secure generic versions of patented medicines.

 

“We’ll tell the drugs companies that if they want public research funding, then they’ll have to make their drugs affordable for all.

 

“And we will create a new, publicly owned generic drugs manufacturer to supply cheaper medicines to our NHS – saving our health service money, and saving lives.”

 

In the immediate term, to make life-changing and life-saving drugs available on the NHS, Labour will:

 

• Actively use voluntary and compulsory licenses to secure affordable generic versions of patented medicines where the patented product cannot be accessed;
• Increase the transparency of medicine prices, the true cost of research and development and pharmaceutical company finances so that the NHS can have informed discussions on drug pricing;
• Resist efforts to increase corporate control over medicine and drug intellectual property rights in future trade deals by excluding provisions that go beyond the TRIPS agreement.

 

In the longer run, Labour will create a health innovation system that puts public health first by:

 

• Creating a publicly owned pharmaceutical company to manufacture generic drugs and medicines to sell to the NHS at affordable prices, with any profits reinvested back into the existing network of publicly-funded research and development facilities, used to offset the cost of more expensive drugs or fund non-drug based public health interventions to improve health outcomes;
• Separate innovation from price incentives by replacing the current system – where research and development funding is channelled into the most lucrative and profitable medicines – with a system of innovation funding based on upfront grants or subsidies and funding awards tied to priorities that are most socially valuable and challenging – such as antimicrobial resistance;
• Attach public interest conditions to any public funding for research and development so any organisation receiving taxpayers’ money will need to ensure patient access and affordability, share their knowledge and disclose data on their research and development spending.

 

Ends

 

Notes to Editors

 

• Labour’s Medicines for the Many report:

 

labour.org.uk/medicinesforthemany

·       Cystic Fibrosis drug Orkambi is unavailable on the NHS in England, Wales and NI. Its manufacturer, Vertex, lists the price for Orkambi as £104,000 per patient per year. In 2018, Vertex refused the “largest commitment” the NHS has ever made: £500m over 5 years for its cystic fibrosis drugs (Orkambi, Kalydeco, Symkevi and its Triple Therapy drug which is still being trialed).

 

• Campaigners and patients delivered a 20,000 strong petition to Pfizer HQ demanding that they drop the price of breast cancer drug palbociclib

 

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/dec/20/drug-giants-hefty-prices-nhs-vital-medication-pharma-profits

 

• A new generation of Direct Acting Antiviral drugs (DAAs) offered a revolution in Hepatitis C treatment. Cure rates from Gilead’s Sovaldi (sofosbuvir) are over 95% with minimal side effects, often curing patients in just twelve weeks. 
• But when Sovaldi came to the UK in 2015, the list price of £34,983 was so high that the NHS could not afford to treat everyone who needed it. In 2016, Gilead introduced Harvoni (sofosbuvir and ledipasvir), which had an even higher price tag at £39,000 for a twelve week course. 
• Although both drugs were approved by NICE, NHS England baulked at the price tags and rationed treatment to 10,000 patients a year. As a result, only those patients who were seriously ill with liver cirrhosis were given access to treatment. This was the first time a drug had ever been rationed on the NHS due to the price.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/28/nhs-abandoning-thousands-by-rationing-hepatitis-c-drugs

• Research suggests a continued rise in resistance to antibiotics will lead to 10 million people dying every year and a reduction of 2% to 3.5% in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2050 and cost the world up to 100 trillion USD

https://amr-review.org/sites/default/files/AMR%20Review%20Paper%20-%20Tackling%20a%20crisis%20for%20the%20health%20and%20wealth%20of%20nations_1.pdf

 

• The World Health Organization (WHO) warns that there is a serious lack of new antibiotics in the pipeline and that a government led global response is needed to incentivize the production of new antibiotics which are not seen as a viable commercial investment by pharmaceutical companies.

 

https://www.who.int/antimicrobial-resistance/global-action-plan/research-development/en/

 

• A generic drug is a medication created to be the same as an existing approved brand-name drug. Generic medicines work the same as brand-name medicines but, because they are produced outside of patents, they are cheaper.

 

• The World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) sets the international legal framework for the protection of intellectual property for WTO Members. Patents provide the owner with market exclusivity so that the patent owner can charge a premium on new medicines, rather than reducing the price to the cost of production or that of competitors.

 

World Health Organization (2005) Access to medicines. Intellectual property protection: Impact on public health, WHO Drug Information, 19(3), pp. 236-241 [Online]. https://www.who.int/medicines/areas/policy/AccesstoMedicinesIPP.pdf (Accessed 18/4/19)

 

• The TRIPS Agreement includes safeguards that allow governments to issue compulsory or government use licences, known in UK law as Crown use licences, when patent monopolies prevent access to a medicine. A Crown use license effectively enables a government to issue a license to another manufacturer to produce a generic version of a patented drug at a lower price.

 

• In June 2019 the government acknowledged it had a ‘moral obligation’ to explore means of securing access to a generic version of Orkambi, including Crown use licencing, in the face of the continued refusal of Vertex to offer a fair price to the NHS.