Twelve years after Canada's access to medicines regime : should South Africa follow the path?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On 30 August 2003, the World Trade Organization decided that eligible countries without manufacturing capacities would be allowed to import generic drugs once they had been issued with a compulsory licence from an exporter country. Canada was the first country to implement this decision in its patent law and subsequently to apply it. Considering the fact that improving drug accessibility is a priority in sub-Saharan Africa, it is relevant for countries with manufacturing capacities, like South Africa, to consider implementing the August 30th decision into their legislation. This mechanism represents an opportunity for South Africa to develop its pharmaceutical industry and to increase drug accessibility in Africa. In exploring this option, the Canadian drug exportation mechanism could serve as a model for legislation in South Africa. In this article we review the Canadian experience, including the weaknesses of the Canadian platform. Based on lessons from this review, we suggest that South Africa should consider implementing a new drug exportation mechanism in its national patent law in order to rebuild its pharmaceutical manufacturing capacities and to improve access to drugs in Africa. In essence, by supplying sub-Saharan African countries, and thus using the compulsory licensing mechanism created following the Pretoria lawsuits, South Africa would close the loop.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".