MYTH 4: Without patents there would be no medical innovation
Busted! Firstly, if this was true then we wouldn’t need this campaign! – if patents really did incentivise innovation then we would have been ready for the ebola crisis and we’d already have an effective vaccine for the zika virus. Secondly, we wouldn’t have a medical market that was flooded with virtually identical medicines with little added therapeutic value. The independent Drug Bulletin Prescrire has assessed that only 2% of new medicines licensed on the French market between 2000-2013 offered a real advance for their approved indications (See graph below).
