Health Impact Fund

As currently designed, pharmaceutical markets have a fundamental flaw that mainly affects poor people: the development of new medicines is funded exclusively through markups protected by patents. This flaw causes research neglect of diseases concentrated among the poor. It deprives poor people of access to patented medicines even when these can be mass-produced cheaply. And it encourages suboptimal treatment with medicines that earn much higher markups than those that are best for the patient. The Health Impact Fund would create complementary incentives that delink the price of medicines from the fixed costs of innovation and cover the latter through health impact rewards. The webinar addresses issues of global health and the solution of the Health Impact Fund in the light of the current COVID-19 pandemic.