On Thursday evening, 6 February 2020, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) delivered the following statement on WHO’s Global strategy and plan of action on public health, innovation and intellectual property.
We request WHO’s Global Observatory on Health Research and Development to create a database to collect information on the research and development costs directly associated with clinical trials used to support the registration of medicines, vaccines and cell and gene-therapies. This would align the Observatory’s activities with the mandate of the WHO transparency resolution.
We commend the policy recommendation emanating from the Report on Cancer (published on February 4th, 2020 on World Cancer Day) which called on countries and health systems to report “the costs of research, development, and production, including any public sources of funding of cancer treatments”.
We request the Director-General to conduct a feasibility study to examine models of different possible means of de-linking research and development costs from product prices. In light of the rise of catastrophic health expenditures that drain health budgets, WHO will never achieve universal health coverage without the delinkage of R&D costs from the prices of drugs, vaccines and other health technologies.
Thank you Dr. Nakatani.