Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is scheduled to break the patent on Merck & Co's AIDS drug Efavirenz today after the company's offer to cut prices failed to satisfy demands from the country's health ministry.
Lula, in a presidential palace ceremony at 11 a.m. New York time, is scheduled to sign a law allowing the government to buy a generic version of Efavirenz from laboratories certified by the World Health Organization, the president's office said.
The government will still consider any new proposal from Merck, Health Minister Jose Gomes Temporao told reporters yesterday.
The presidential decree would mark the first time Brazil by-passed a patent since the country began recognizing drug patents in 1996, said Michel Lotrowska, Brazil's representative of the access campaign for essential medicines at Doctors Without Borders. The government is pushing for lower drug prices to limit costs of the free treatment offered all 200,000 people in the country infected with AIDS and the HIV virus that causes the disease, he said.
``This is progress as it's the only way to cut drug prices since patents don't allow a natural competition in the market,'' Lotrowska said in a telephone interview from Rio de Janeiro.
Merck, the third-largest U.S. pharmaceutical maker, offered to cut the price of the drug to the government by 30 percent to $1.10 a pill from $1.59.
The government said the company must cut the price to 65 U.S. cents a pill, the same as that paid by Thailand. Efavirenz is the principal component in a 17-drug cocktail to treat AIDS and is used by 38 percent of AIDS patients.
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