The Geman news portal, Gerechte Gesundheit or Just Health, featured the Health Impact Fund in its August 15 newsletter. Lead by a distinguished group of academics and clinicians, Just Health reports on the distributional politics of healthcare around the world.
Titled “The Health of Others”, the article describes a lecture given by Thomas Pogge at the Berlin Institute for Christian Ethics and Policy. During the talk, Pogge made the case for implementing his Health Impact Fund proposal. He justified the Fund by pointing out that numerous international rules and regulations have been built around the interests of affluent countries and global elites and undermine the interests of poor people. People living in affluent countries, as beneficiaries of these arrangements, have a duty to mitigate the harms inflicted upon the poor. The TRIPS Agreement, which requires WTO members to grant 20-year patent protection to new medicines and other innovations, inflicts serious harm. By blocking the manufacture of generic versions of new medicines, TRIPS makes these treatments too expensive for the majority of the world’s population.
The Health Impact Fund, Pogge said, could minimize the damage caused by the TRIPS Agreement, by offering pharmaceutical companies the opportunity to be rewarded for new medicines on the basis of health impact, rather than through high, patent-protected prices. By registering with the Health Impact Fund, these companies would commit themselves to distributing their new medicine at the cost of production globally, while receiving payment from a global fund, on the basis of the impact of the product on global health.
To learn more about the Health Impact Fund, visit healthimpactfund.com.