[bobwaycott]

The above quote, for mobile users:

> On January 25, 2007, Thailand’s interim government issued compulsory licenses–which require manufacturers to license generic versions of their patented drugs–for two Western medicines: Kaletra, an advanced anti-AIDS medicine manufactured by Abbott; and Plavix, a blood-thinning treatment to help prevent heart disease, produced by the France-based Sanofi-Aventis and U.S. firm Bristol-Myers Squibb. These attacks were preceded in November 2006 by a violation of Merck’s patent on the anti-AIDS drug Stocrin.[5] The government threatened to break patents on eleven more drugs.[6] Explaining the rationale behind Thailand’s decision, health minister Mongkol Na Songkhla said that “the move is permissible under international trade rules in the event of national public health emergencies. . . . We have to do this because we don’t have enough money to buy safe and necessary drugs for the people under the government’s universal health scheme.”