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Feature Interview
This interview, conducted by by Nat Thomson, Simmons MSW Candidate, runs abridged in the September 2024 issue of the Simmon's MPH Monthly. Alan Rossi Silva, PhD was formerly the Coordinator of International Affairs with Brazil's Grupo de Trabalho sobre Propriedade Intelectual (GTPI) and is now project coordinator with the People's Health Movement. Alan is from Suzano, São Paulo, Brazil where he completed his studies and now resides in Leuven, Belgium. Our conversation is followed by some reading recommendations from Alan for those who wish to learn more and even get involved in the movement.
Hi Alan, thanks for taking the time to talk with us. To start, it might be interesting to hear about how you made your way into practicing law.
Well, first, in Brazil you have to decide these things when you are very young, [based on how the education system is designed]. [From early in life] I was really, really committed to the idea of changing the world. At the time, being young, It seemed logical to me that studying law would be part of the knowledge I would have to acquire in order to change the world. In retrospect, I would say this is a superficial viewpoint. And as with everything that is superficial, it was quite obvious to me then that law would be the way to understand society and to change society. So that was the idea, but at the time of starting my law studies, I was totally ignorant of the field in which I am currently immersed, that of intellectual property law. I couldn’t even have imagined that it existed when I started my studies, to be honest.
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. It aligned with my vision or principles, but was something way more complex than defending someone in a trial, which was more my orientation at the time. I ended up taking a role as his teaching assistant for his course for three years while also being part of his research group. This was all around 2014 and I have been focused on the topic since then, so around 10 years now. While we have shifted the thinking and objectives over the years, the focus has remained on the intersection of intellectual property and access to health technologies of all sorts.
For our predominantly US readership, how similar or different would you say the philosophies and laws around intellectual property and patents are, between The US and Brazil?
Generally speaking, we must say that they are very similar from the 1990s on, which is when the TRIPS Agreement was approved and put in place. TRIPS resulted in standardization of Brazilian IP law, having it fall in line with a minimum criteria put forth by the Global North—the US, EU nations, Japan [and the like]. It’s important to note that this was not the process of a true negotiation, and instead more of an imposition by the Global North upon the Global South. Simply put, the richer nations and their transnational corporations determined that the intellectual property regime of the TRIPS agreement would be established, so everyone should comply.
So if one hears this agreement being discussed or described as a “negotiation” we should consider this description as PR spin? It just occurs to me that this is a great lesson in being a critical consumer of media reporting and organizational language; what the powers that be put forth may not be the whole, or even the half, truth.
Yes. It’s well documented in many pieces of literature. For example, Private Power, Public Law by Susan K. Sell [lays out very clearly how TRIPS truly came to be].
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.
On account of my experiences working with Professor Feres as a part of his research group, I was convinced that I would be an academic and that I would like to continue on in research and teaching. I chose to pursue my Master’s with the same university, the Federal University of Juiz de Fora. But during the master’s work I started to ask myself about making an impact and if I was diverging from my initial goal of looking to change the world. I felt like I didn’t want to become detached from people’s suffering. So I finished my master’s degree with this in mind and moved to Rio to pursue my Phd at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. While in Rio, I started to engage with the civil society organizations there. I volunteered with the UAEM (Universities Allied for Essential Medicines) and then with ABIA (Brazilian Interdisciplinary Aids Association). These were life changing experiences for me, where I had the opportunity to work alongside seasoned activists, who also became my mentors and friends, such as Veriano Terto Jr., Felipe Fonseca, Pedro Villardi, and Susana Ploeg. I was accepted to take the role of the lawyer for ABIA, working on a specific project called the Working Group on Intellectual Property (GTPI) of the Brazilian Network for the Integration of Peoples (REBRIP). Throughout my time in law school, I had been involved in social movements, but when I entered the UAEM and ABIA I was able to connect this more directly with my intellectual property work from prior in my academic career. Things all came together.
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.
I’m glad you brought up the role that lobbying and propaganda can end up playing in the public health space. Could you talk a little bit more about how that tends to play out with patenting?
Well, the propaganda of the Global North is very strong, especially in the Global South. Not everyone knows what a patent is or how it works. But asking people about patents, you will tend to hear that they are important for fostering innovation. This has yet to be proven through empirical means. In fact, there are many authors and pieces of published work that prove that there isn’t a relationship between patents and innovation, but instead a negative relationship. Patents instead undermine innovation in many cases, along with allowing for abuses of the patent system, which some call “patent trolling”; bullying competitors using the rules and loopholes of the system. So we have a baseless and harmful system in place, yet you will hear people talking about fixing the system, curbing abuse, balancing the system or that the system works just fine. Because of political and economic power from transnational corporations [and the associated propaganda], people are inclined to believe these things, despite the lack of evidence. This situation closely mirrors the commercial disinformation surrounding tobacco, ultra-processed foods, sugar and climate change.
And for our MPH students here at Simmons, what might you say is important to think about in their public health studies and careers in regards to the misconceptions and propaganda around patents?
I’m not well versed specifically in the US market but I can tell you that anyone who tends to study or work on this topic knows the consequences; shortages and exorbitant retail pricing. Everyone in the world is paying too much for medicines. In the US the prices are even higher. Because the US lacks a strong public health system, we see that the severe consequences of abusive pricing fall entirely on the backs of American families. There is no clearer way to see the impact of the patent system than looking at the reality of what is happening right now in the US. It’s a hot topic in the US Congress. It’s limited and insufficient, but there has been a recent law trying to limit patent system abuse by going after a practice called “evergreening.” So it’s very important to understand how the patent system is the major reason why you don’t have access to important health technologies and therefore ultimately the right to health itself.
Before we end, could you talk a little bit about The Public Pharma for Europe coalition you are involved in as well?
Absolutely. This is a fundamental part of my life now so I would love to. It’s something I got involved in as soon as I arrived here in Belgium. 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. In March of 2024, we organized a conference. From the conference came the coalition, made up of different organizations, activists, scientists and academics with goals of expansion. 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.
We thank Alan Silva so much for his time speaking with us!
For those who wish to learn more IP, patents, and access to medicines, Alan provided some reading suggestions:
Op-Eds
Books
May, C., & Sell, S. K. (2006). Intellectual property rights: A Critical History. Lynne Rienner Pub.
Sell, S. K. (2003). Private power, public law.
Papers/Reports
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