At the 128th meeting of the WHO Executive Board (EB), the European members of the board are reportedly taking a hard line on the proposal by Switzerland to have Paul Herrling, an executive of Novartis, appointed to the WHO Consultative Expert Working Group (CEWG) on R&D financing. Our earlier blogs on this controversy are available here and here).
On Tuesday’s discussion at the 128th Executive Board on the Draft WHO HIV/AIDS strategy 2011–2015, the United States made a strong intervention (delivered by Dr. Nils Daulaire, Director, Office of Global Health Affairs, Department of Health and Human Services) in support of the Medicines Patent Pool drawing attention to the fact that the draft HIV/AIDS strategy while making reference to a more competitive market for ARVs, failed to recognized the importance of the Medicines Patent Pool.
Here below are the remarks of the US on this point:
This note provide additional context for those who are just now following the issue of conflicts of interest and the WHO Consultative Expert Working Group (CEWG) on R&D Financing.
The CEWG follows a controversial, flawed and failed effort by an earlier group, the WHO Expert Working Group (EWG) on R&D Financing, to:
At the end of the day on Monday, the 128 WHO Executive Board meeting took the agenda item for creation of a new R&D Financing consultative expert working group (CEWG). (Yesterday’s blog on this topic is here)
Today the WHO is expected to take up the Report by the Secretariat on “the Establishment of a consultative expert working group on research and development: financing and coordination.” (link here).
The following reports the number of Google hits using the search term “gates foundation,” with a site:domainname option, on January 7, 2011. The result is a count of the number of web pages (visible to Google) mentioning the Gates Foundation on a particular domain.
For example, the google search site:who.int “gates foundation” identified 5,940 pages on the who.int web site that have the exact phrase, “gates foundation.”