Thomas Pogge to speak at Baker Institute on ways to limit poverty-related mortality

CONTACT: Franz Brotzen
PHONE: 713-348-6775
E-MAIL: franz.brotzen@rice.edu  

Thomas Pogge to speak at Baker Institute on ways to limit poverty-related mortality

Some 18 million people die annually from poverty-related causes. Many more suffer grievously from treatable diseases or are severely affected by avoidable death and disease in their families. Moral and political philosopher Thomas Pogge will discuss ways to limit the suffering at a Jan. 28 presentation at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

Pogge, the Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University and the research director at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature at the University of Oslo, will speak on “The Health Impact Fund: How Not to Exclude the Poor from Advanced Medicines.”

One of the proposals to counter poverty-related deaths is to supplement the rules established by the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement), which govern pharmaceutical innovation. These rules result in steep prices of advanced medicine and steer medical research away from diseases concentrated among marginalized populations.

Pogge will discuss one proposal designed to complement these rules: the Health Impact Fund (HIF), financed by governments around the world. The HIF would offer pharmaceutical companies the opportunity to participate in a reward pool by registering new products with the fund. For the next 10 years, participants would receive a share equal to their respective share of the assessed global health impact of all HIF-registered products. The more people that benefit from the medicine, the more money the company receives. The innovator would commit to making its product available wherever it is needed at the lowest feasible cost of manufacture and distribution.

Fully consistent with TRIPS, the HIF achieves three key advances: It directs pharmaceutical research toward the most serious diseases, including those concentrated among the poor; it makes all HIF-registered medicines available at a more affordable price; and it gives innovators an incentive to promote the optimal use of their HIF-registered medicines. All these steps would result in significant health gains.

Pogge is a distinguished moral and political philosopher known especially for his work on global justice. He is the author of the pioneering book “World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms” and editor of “Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right: Who Owes What to the Very Poor?”

The event begins at 4 p.m. in Baker Hall’s Kelly International Conference Facility on the Rice University campus, 6100 Main St. For directions, go to http://www.rice.edu/maps/maps.html.

There will be a reception afterward. The free lecture, a presentation of the Rice University Lecture Series on Ethics, Politics and Society, is open to the public.

Members of the news media who want to attend should RSVP to Franz Brotzen at franz.brotzen@rice.edu or 713-348-6775.