Description
New molecular antibodies are revolutionizing treatments, but come at an increasingly problematic price for health services worldwide. In discussions about pricing, patients are effectively excluded yet very eager to access treatment. In 2015 patients challenged this exclusion in the UK by invoking the rights of the Crown for access to Kadcyla, an expensive yet potentially life-saving medicine that had been de-listed. This paper takes seriously this campaign’s claim of sovereign reassertion against the industry’s exclusionary monopoly position, which challenges but ultimately does not overcome the concrete mechanism enabling this exclusion – intellectual property (IP). By drawing parallels with other molecular sovereignty campaigns, the paper finds the concept of sovereignty unwittingly reinscribing the IP system’s deeply engrained biocolonial (Schwartz-Marín and Restrepo 2013) fiction of the world as terra nullius, a blank uninhabited canvas ripe for discovery, which continues to exclude patients from debates about the price of medicines, modifies claims of resistance into ultimately less challenging deliberations, and prevents a global challenge from arising. Instead of countering this fundamental exclusion, debates about sovereignty recast resistance in the global South as a matter of property and thus create further divisions in the struggle over the assignation of ownership.
