Most of my blog entries are prompted by something I read. If I think it’s wrong, I’ll put up a blog saying why. That’s all fine as far as it goes, but it does mean that if you just went by what I said in public about Dean Baker, say, you’d think I thought he was a bit of a wally. In fact, I respect him highly and read him religiously.
Yesterday, Dean had a blog entry looking at Newsweek, and its coverage of Big Pharma in Thailand:
The drug industry is furious over the possibility that their patent monopolies may not be protected. Newsweek apparently shares the drug industry’s anger, telling readers that “advocates of free trade see Thailand’s move as a big threat.”
Actually, any real advocate of free trade, almost by definition, would have to applaud Thailand’s action. After all, the Thai government is eliminating a government imposed monopoly and allowing drugs to sell at prices that are much closer to their free market level.
Dean is entirely correct here. In fact, I think he lets Newsweek’s George Wehrfritz off too lightly. For Wehrfritz is guilty of much more than a simple mistake of terminology. He explains that Thailand is essentially abolishing patent protection for anti-Aids drugs, cutting their cost by as much as 90%, “by invoking vague World Trade Organization rules that allow governments to void drug patents during public- health emergencies”. He then continues by saying that “experts have likened the WTO drug rules to nuclear weapons—deterrents best never used”. (He never says which experts said this.)
Wehrfritz continues in this vein: “Thailand represents a class of nations that could put a huge dent in drug-company profits if they follow suit,” he writes, and then conjures up a parade of horribles in which not only Thailand but the Philippines and Brazil and Bolivia all start choosing their own citizens’ lives over the profits of foreign drug companies.
Wehrfritz concludes with a chilling vision of “a system regulated by bureaucrats, not markets, in which poor and not-so-poor alike contribute little to the huge cost of R&D for drugs to contain the planet’s killer diseases.” Of course, he never bothers to quantify the amount of money that Big Pharma actually spends on “R&D for drugs to contain the planet’s killer diseases,” because if he did, he’d find that it was embarrassingly small — especially when it comes to killer diseases which kill overwhelmingly in poor and middle-income countries.
In general, news organizations do an atrocious job of presenting a fair and balanced take on any issues pertaining to intellectual property. The IP owners are always right — in Newsweek, in the New Yorker, or in any major media outlet you care to mention. Meanwhile, the blogosphere is full of people like Baker and Lessig who compellingly explain why everything most reporters think they know on the subject is wrong. Viva Blogs — and long may they continue!