Big Pharma's Trade Attacks on Medicine Access

After decade of trade rules pharmaceutical firms helped to write and merger mania fueled by weak enforcement of competition policy, most critical medicines are no longer made in the United States. Most U.S. imports of finished medicines come from India and Europe. But production there relies on the vast majority of active pharmaceutical ingredients sourced in China. Overreliance on imports and concentration of production of medicines and their component parts in too few countries is a threat to U.S. public health and national security. Disruptions from geopolitical conflicts, global pandemics, and climate disasters necessitate action to build more domestic production and diversify import sources.

Meanwhile, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and so-called Free Trade Agreements require governments to guarantee pharmaceutical corporations lengthy monopoly protections that empower them to raise medicine prices. As a result, even during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, people in many countries worldwide could not access the effective mRNA vaccines, lifesaving treatments like Paxlovid and Remdesivir, or diagnostic tests. In addition to causing avoidable deaths and economic devastation, the shortage of COVID medications in developing countries meant raging outbreaks that allowed the virus to mutate into new variants with the duration of the pandemic extended worldwide. More than 120 countries, thousands of organizations worldwide, hundreds of Nobel laureates and former prime ministers and presidents, and even the Pope demanded an emergency waiver of the WTO’s monopoly guarantees that let a few Big Pharma corporations decide how much and where vital COVID-19 medicines would be made and sold. Even in a deadly pandemic, the trade-pact-required monopoly protections for Big Pharma were not waived. This corporate intellectual property protectionism has no place in our trade pacts.

Rethink Trade develops analyses and engages in advocacy to support a trade and antimonopoly policy approach to fix Big Pharma’s abuses of global trade negotiations, rebuild brittle supply chains resulting from trade deals encouraging race-to-the-bottom production standards, and onshore U.S. production of medicines.