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October 20, 2015

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement and Implications for Access to Essential Medicines

Author Affiliations
  • 1Program on Regulation, Therapeutics, and Law, Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts
JAMA. 2015;314(15):1563-1564. doi:10.1001/jama.2015.10872

After a difficult legislative battle, President Obama signed into law Trade Promotion Authority on June 29, 2015. The legislation allows for an up-or-down vote with no amendments in Congress for international trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement. The TPP Agreement includes 12 Asia-Pacific countries (United States, Canada, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Australia, and New Zealand) with a collective trading power amounting to 40% of the global gross domestic product. The TPP Agreement is still being negotiated; recently, in a meeting of trade ministers in Maui, Hawaii, negotiators failed to finalize the text of the Agreement due in large part to disagreement regarding intellectual property protections for pharmaceutical products.1

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