Developing countries are not making the most of TRIPS flexibilities because of political pressure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The flexibility given to developing countries to provide medicines more cheaply to those in need is not being exploited to its full capacity, a legal expert on public health has said. While the Declaration on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and Public Health, signed in Doha in 2001, reinforced several types of flexibilities to boost access to medicines, developing countries are not taking full advantage of them, Frederick Abbott, professor of international law at Florida State University College of Law, told the BMJ . He gave an interview to the BMJ at the 5th High-Level Symposium on Global Health Diplomacy, which was held on 23 November at the World Trade Organization in Geneva. Professor Abbott, who was also a symposium panellist, said that only one country, for example, had used the flexible import-export mechanism allowed under the TRIPS agreement. Rwanda had used it to import a generic fixed dose combination antiretroviral drug from a Canadian company under compulsory licence. Limited implementation of TRIPS flexibilities was caused by various factors, he said, but one of the greatest challenges that developing countries face is political pressure, increasingly manifested in bilateral and regional agreements that restrict flexibilities. “Developing countries have found that if they attempt to issue government use or compulsory licences, even on AIDS medicines, they come under intense political pressure, from the home country of the originator …
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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 | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 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".