Washington Post on the Fate of Two Good Ideas

Sebastian Mallaby in today's Washington Post complains that policy-makers have been more attracted to advance purchase commitments than they have to Jenny Lanjouw's proposal to allow medicines whose markets are mainly in rich countries to be available cheaply in poor countries. Sebastian Mallaby speculates that the advance purchase commitment proposal has had more success because "drug companies want to close down all ideas involving weaker intellectual property rights".Owen comments:Sebastian Mallaby is right to label as "self-evidently good" these two policy proposals, both of which have been promoted by the Center for Global Development.But uncharacteristically, Sebastian Mallaby gets his facts wrong, in his suggestion that "The Gates people, working through the Center for Global Development in Washington, have brought in a law firm to draft appropriate language.", and the implication that one idea has been promoted more vigorously than the other because of industry concerns to protect the intellectual property regime. This is wrong because:

• Both these proposals have been supported and promoted by the Center for Global Development, where Jenny Lanjouw is a non-resident fellow. We have consistently supported both ideas.
• The research on advance purchase commitments was lead by CGD under a general grant supporting health policy research. CGD did not do this as the agent of the Gates Foundation or anyone else. We are an independent, non-partisan research organisation.
• The law firm that worked on this for CGD, Covington and Burling, did so pro bono, and this was organised by CGD, not by the Gates Foundation.
• Elsewhere in this blog, we have highlighted proposals such as the Medical R&D Treaty and Medical Innovation Prize Fund; this hardly seems like the actions of lackeys under instructions to protect the intellectual property regime at all costs.
• The Gates Foundation operates completely separately from Microsoft, and Bill Gates's commercial interests. In my experience of dealing with them, I have never seen the slightest sign that they would take a policy position based on the likely impact on Microsoft - and the staff there, who are experts in global health, probably have little knowledge and care less about Microsoft's commercial interests.