Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17097

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Electronic Source

Silverman E
WHO Panel Member: Meetings Were Manipulated
Pharmalot 2010 Jan 25
http://www.pharmalot.com/2010/01/who-panel-member-says-meetings-were-manipulated/#more-21094

Full text:

A member of a World Health Organization panel of experts that is contemplating new global taxes on e-mail, alcohol, tobacco, airline travel and consumer bank transactions, charges she was given only selective info at group meetings, deliberations were rushed and her group was “manipulated” by the pharmaceutical industry, Fox News reports. Such taxes could be used to finance research, development and manufacturing capabilities to the developing world.
Her charges were denied by the head of WHO’s Expert Working Group on Research and Development Financing (EWG), a 25-member panel of medical experts, academics and health care bureaucrats, which is due to present a 98-page report in Geneva after spending more than a year deliberating “new and innovative sources of funding” to reshape the global medical industry.
But Cecilia Lopez Montano, a federal senator from Colombia, says the group’s working sessions she attended were truncated, her suggestions to examine intellectual patent rights held by drugmakers were ignored, and that neither she nor “the majority of the members of the group” actually participated in the findings “in a full manner.” She tells Fox News that, “if we are talking about getting cheaper medicines for poor people, how we could discuss this without talking about intellectual property rights?”
“The only comment I would make for public consumption is that her allegations are completely unfounded,” EWG chairperson George Alleyne tells Fox News. “To my knowledge, not a single member of the group has associated himself or herself with her comments.”
The financing mechanism would distribute funds for “new drugs, vaccines, diagnostics and intervention for the poor, as well as medical research in low- and middle-income countries, new centers for the collection and analysis of research and development data, and new authority to distribute research assignments among public and private entities,” Fox quotes the report as saying. The estimated cost, in the early stages, would range from $3 billion to $15 billion annually.
You may recall that WHO Director General Margaret Chan says she has begun an investigation to learn who leaked draft reports compiled by its Expert Working Group to a pharmaceutical industry trade group last month (background here).