Opinion: Gilead must be held accountable for the harm caused by ‘patent hopping’ an HIV treatment
Gilead Sciences, a pharma company that dominates the market for HIV treatments, agreed in June to settle a case in federal court for $40 million that had been brought by 2,625 people living with HIV. But as a similar and far larger case looms in California courts, right-leaning, big-business-can-do-no-wrong opinion columnists and editorial boards are claiming the lawsuit threatens to destroy the pharmaceutical industry’s ability to innovate.
That’s utter nonsense. Their alarmism reminds me of the critics of early AIDS activism, when ACT UP was accused of scaring pharma companies away from AIDS research. But the opposite occurred — more companies jumped in as the drug approval process sped up.
