[ad_1]
GENEVA (Reuters) – Governments are working on an agreement on drug price transparency at the annual meeting of the World Health Organization (WHO), but activists said Thursday worried about cost crucially, allowing pharmaceutical companies to maintain high prices.
Activists say that some drugs have exorbitant prices, even if they are often developed with public funds, and that health providers often pay too much because governments negotiate prices without knowing the cost of treatment.
"We are not talking about a revolution for the sector, we are simply talking about setting a fair price based on what has been invested," said Patrick Durisch at Public Eye, a Swiss non-profit organization. "Why should it be different for the pharmaceutical industry than in other sectors?"
WHO released Thursday a six-page draft calling on states to publish prices and costs for drugs, vaccines, cell and gene-based therapies and other health technologies, and to improve transparency. medical patents.
The project, a work in progress with many proposed changes to the text, could also require the WHO to collect and badyze data and costs from clinical trials and drug purchase prices and of vaccines, although the project indicates that Switzerland, Germany and Japan have requested this section to be deleted.
On Monday, US Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar said that the United States is very supportive of greater price transparency for drugs, in the hope of lowering "catalog prices" for drugs. drugs and "out-of-pocket expenses" for consumers.
But there are areas in which to unveil corporate secrecy may not be useful, as in R & D spending, Azar told reporters.
"The question around R & D is: is there really significant transparency and information that would be taken into account in the pricing and trading of products? We think this is not necessarily the area of greatest value for our efforts, but we continue to look at this. "
Transparency activists have expressed concern that a handful of countries, including Germany and Britain, are trying to remove the resolution with "a thousand cuts".
Gaelle Krikorian, of the medical charity Doctors Without Borders, said she could not understand why governments, who buy drugs, wanted to blind themselves during price negotiations with pharmaceutical companies.
"We want to open the black box," she said.
James Love, director of Knowledge Economy International, said that although the resolution is not mandatory, asking companies to report the cost of clinical trials was controversial.
"It is quite possible that delegates will agree on a resolution that does not mention costs," he said.
The meeting ends on Tuesday.
Reporting by Tom Miles; Edited by Alexandra Hudson
Source link
