Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2004, Canada enacted into law the Jean Chretien Pledge to Africa Act - now redubbed Canada's Access to Medicines Regime (CAMR). The law was Canada's gesture to implement World Trade Organization decisions that eased the rules on manufacturing and exporting patented medicines, where these were needed by poor countries in Africa and elsewhere lacking the means to manufacture. Although enacted with much fanfare, the law has resulted in only a single shipment of AIDS medicines from Canada to Rwanda - a one-off wonder that the supplier of the medicines says it is unwilling to repeat. CAMR is therefore generally regarded as a failure. Six years later, in 2010, Canada's House of Commons and Senate are entertaining amendments to resurrect CAMR into usefulness. In this paper, I examine the proposed amendments now before the House of Commons and the Senate. I conclude that the amendments are highly unlikely to bring any benefits to public health, and on the contrary, are so dangerously misconceived as to threaten human health or life. Much the same rules as are contained in the amendments have already been tried in the laws of China, the European Union, India, Norway, South Korea and Switzerland, without resulting in any medicines - not so much as one pill - being exported to poor countries in need. Further, the amendments remove the regulatory scrutiny of Canada's Food and Drugs Act, meaning that in the future, medicines manufactured in Canada could be exported to poor countries exempt from all scientific standards of safety and efficacy. Not even Canada's generic drug industry supports the latter proposal, although surprisingly, charities such as Medecins Sans Frontieres, Oxfam and the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, and United Nations organizations such as UNICEF and UNDP, have given the amendments their enthusiastic support.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".