Alan Rossi Silva, PhD was previosly the Coordinator of International Affairs with Grupo de Trabalho sobre Propriedade Intelectual (GTPI, Brazil) and is now a project coordinator with the People's Health Movement. Alan is from Suzano, São Paulo, Brazil and now lives in Leuven, Belgium, pushing for access to medicines and the right to health.

Read our highlights below and find the full conversation as well as reading recommendations here. 

How did your law studies and career start to shift towards what you’re doing now then, working in the IP and patent space specifically focused on medicines and health technologies?

My idea of changing the world through law early on was more connected to defending people as a lawyer or being a judge or protecting workers’ rights. I would say the earliest transformative experience that started to shift my ideas and focus was meeting Professor Marcos Vinício Chein Feres, who became a true mentor and good friend. He was a professor I had in my first semester. Professor Feres had a research group focused on patents and access to medicines, particularly neglected tropical diseases. This opened up a new perspective on law for me, where one asks what are the problems of society and what is there that we can do about it in the legal sense.

I wanted to ask about the legal work you had done in the recent past around COVID vaccines since we are all still learning about the ways the world will react to pandemics, epidemics and other large scale global health events in the contemporary era.

My work with ABIA started mid-march of 2020, so immediately here I am working for one of the most important civil society organizations in Brazil, working on intellectual property as COVID-19 quarantines were starting to come into effect. [Right away at ABIA/GTPI] I had to help draft a bill for the Brazilian Congress to change the compulsory license regime of patents. You might have heard of this referred to as “patent breaking.” The goal was to create an automatic compulsory license in instances of events like COVID-19. The compulsory license approach is one of the safeguards that is in the TRIPS agreement. A so-called flexibility. Some say compulsory license is the best solution. Some others say that it is radical. I tend to disagree on both counts. Although it is easy to implement, it’s vulnerable to the influences of transnational corporations and Global North countries. That’s why we proposed, instead, an automatic compulsory license regime, wherein the very existence of an event like the COVID-19 pandemic would start the process of compulsory license. This way, the people of the country who needed COVID-19 vaccination would not be subject to our government’s political will and power as the means to initiate the process. Spoiler, but it was not approved. Rich countries and their transnational corporations stepped in to exercise pressure to block the change through fierce lobbying and soft power propaganda.

Could you talk a little bit about The Public Pharma for Europe coalition you are involved in as well?

Being involved in the People’s Health Movement (PHM), I had the incredible opportunity to meet Leigh Haynes and many other inspiring activists who were tired of the same old debates and taking part in a sort of reactivism. We all wanted to launch a movement centered around a concrete and proactive idea. After much discussion and planning we decided to organize around affecting real change in the pharmaceuticals sector. We are hoping to launch officially in the next few weeks. The status quo currently is that the pharmaceutical sector is dominated by huge transnational corporations. This is the problem that we need an alternative solution for. We believe that Public Pharma is, at least, part of a real solution. The term is defined differently depending on who you ask, but I define it as a state owned infrastructure, dedicated to researching, developing, manufacturing and/or distributing health technologies. In the U.S., the NIH could be considered a powerful example. It would center around more state involvement as a way to shift from Big Pharma to Public Pharma. The focus can’t be on intellectual property or profit, the focus is on the health needs of the population. It’s also not about fixing so-called “market failures” but building a new system that exists outside of a neoliberal market orientation.