[Civil society in South Korea renewed its commitment to ensure
universal access to medicines and public pharmaceutical production,
building on decades of mobilization]
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HEALTH MOVEMENT IN SOUTH KOREA FIGHTS FOR UNIVERSAL ACCESS TO
MEDICINES  
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Jyotsna Singh, Ana Vračar
September 10, 2022
People's Dispatch
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_ Civil society in South Korea renewed its commitment to ensure
universal access to medicines and public pharmaceutical production,
building on decades of mobilization _

South Korean health activists protest in front of the National
Assembly in April 2021, urging the government to support the TRIPS
Waiver proposal, PHM South Korea

 

Patients’ organizations, right to health groups, and other sections
of civil society in South Korea remain committed to upholding
universal access to essential medicines locally and globally, states a
recent report
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by the Alliance for a Better Pharmaceutical Production Regime
(Alliance). Members of the Alliance, including the People’s Health
Institute (PHI), Korean Pharmacists for Democratic Society (KPDS) and
others, have expressed their intention to continue the struggle
launched in the 2000s, driven by the need to ensure secure access and
the public character of medicines.

While activists largely agree that South Korea has widespread
production capacities, they warn that these are under-used or misused,
at least as far as responding to global public needs is concerned. As
governments do not make public production of pharmaceuticals their
priority so as to favor private companies, the question about their
optimum utilization lingers. “What we can agree on is that Korea has
a lot of production capacities. But because there is not enough
transparency and systemic development of public resources in the
field, we don’t actually know much about their quality,” says Sun
Kim, director of PHI’s Research Center on Global Solidarity.

PROFITS OVER LIVES 

The existing production capacities in South Korea were mostly
developed with government support since the late 1990s. But since
then, pharmaceutical production has been almost exclusively regarded
as an engine for growth rather than a tool for advancing public
interest. Such a set-up gives producers the advantage when they
negotiate with the government, and they have been known to use this as
much as possible. The industry’s attempts to protect their own
profits and interests have been systematic, carried out in the
long-term, and sometimes involve less-than-formal deals.

In the early 2000s, there were widespread protests against the high
cost of the leukemia drug Imatinib. The producer of the drug, the
Swiss company Novartis, secretly offered patients’ groups the option
of reimbursing out-of-pocket payments if they agreed to not oppose the
price the company was going to offer to the government. This would
have meant that the patients would take the medicine for free, but the
government would bear the cost and it would further allow the company
to quote high prices while negotiating with other countries, explains
Sun Kim. “In practice, this would mean that the same drug would
remain out of reach for people in other parts of the world, who would
be forced to accept the price as it was set by the producer,” she
says.

‘PUBLICNESS’ OF PHARMA PRODUCTION

Going beyond the narrow focus on securing access to medicines for the
Koreans alone, the Alliance advocates for ‘publicness’ of global
pharmaceutical production. To achieve that goal, it is necessary to
make the most of existing production capacities around the world, and
orient them towards addressing global public health needs. It is
difficult to achieve such a goal in a context where policies are
shaped around concepts such as knowledge-based economy and innovative
growth, like in the case of South Korea.

The existing set of policies has led to a relaxation of drug
regulation practices, often to the detriment of patients – and
almost always to the detriment of the public health budget. Several
pharma-related scandals in the past six years bring a warning about
the dangers of pursuing a path which tries to incentivize private
production through deregulation and fostering venture capital. “The
current model gives pharmaceutical companies ample space to protect
the prices of their companies’ stock, although this might go against
the best interest of patients and the health system,” says Sun Kim.

In South Korea, a well-known example of the misgivings of such a model
is the case of Invossa
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by Kolon Life Sciences for the treatment of moderate osteoarthritis.
The product received regulatory approval process assistance from the
Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS), and it was lauded as South
Korea’s first own cell-based gene therapy when the drug was granted
a license by the MFDS in 2017. By 2019, it was recalled. It surfaced
that Kolon Life Sciences failed to disclose that there was a change in
the type of cells used to produce the drug during development,
presumably to avoid problems with licensing.

A similar thing occurred with a candidate for lung cancer treatment,
the drug Olita
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this case, the producer Hanmi Pharmaceutical delayed reporting of side
effects and deaths during the development clinical trial stage for
more than a year. In addition, the company belatedly announced that
the technology export contract with Boehringer Ingelheim was
terminated.  By doing so, Hanmi Pharmaceutical shielded its status on
the stock market for a little longer, misleading the public at the
same time.

This practice of misinformation or delayed information is not a human
error or an innocent mistake. For big businesses, keeping up the
prices in stock markets has become as important as the price of
products itself. Big pharmaceutical companies are no exception. “It
serves the interest of pharma companies if there is anticipation of a
blockbuster drug. This gives them an incentive to not report data on
time. This lets them make money on medicines for as long as they are
in the market, even though such medicines might be detrimental to
patients’ health,” notes Sun Kim.

PLANS AHEAD

The Alliance for a Better Pharmaceutical Production Regime warns that
more examples such as these are likely to arise in case there is no
major shift in policy. To ensure a reduction in domestic drug cost and
boost accessibility of medicines in low and middle income countries,
“watching and checking the government and companies to meet their
changed status and expectations has become a new task for Korean civil
society,” the Alliance concludes in its report.

_The People’s Health Dispatch is a fortnightly bulletin published by
the __People’s Health Movement_ [[link removed]]_ and
Peoples Dispatch. Read more articles from the latest edition of the
People’s Health Dispatch and subscribe to the newsletter_ _HERE_
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* South Korea; Pharmaceuticals; The Alliance for a Better
Pharmaceutical Production Regime;
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