Global Health Impact: Extending Access to Essential Medicines, Nicole Hassoun . Oxford University Press, 2020, xv + 301 pages.

Abstract

Global Health Impact is based on Hassoun’s broad and extensive scholarship on topics such as global justice, human rights, empirical philosophy and corporate responsibility, and her work as director of the Global Health Impact project (https://www.global-health-impact.org/new), a collaboration between academics and civil society organizations aimed at increasing access to essential medicines. [...]while Hassoun does not reject the global patent system as such, she contends that drug companies exploit this system in ways that violate people’s right to access to essential medicines, e.g. by aggressively extending and multiplying patent protections that keep drugs unaffordable in poor countries and by lobbying against compulsory licensing. [...]she argues that since drug companies contribute to, benefit from and are especially well-placed to address the access to medicines problem, they have a special obligation to address it, an obligation they currently fail to fulfil. [...]the chapter discusses how to collect evidence for other initiatives to improve access to medicines and advance global justice, and why empirical research needs philosophy (and not just the other way around).