Getting the right medicine at the right time can mean the difference between life or death. Yet until COVID-19, there hasn’t been widespread recognition of the importance of creating easy and equitable access to life-saving medications. That’s where Priti Krishtel comes in. While the pandemic has arguably accelerated a movement around global access to medicines, she’s spent the last 20 years working to uncover how the patent system prevents life-saving drugs from getting into the hands of people who need them most.
Priti is a health justice lawyer and co-founder of Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (I-MAK), a nonprofit working to address structural inequities in how medicines are developed and distributed. She investigates the outdated patent system and uses law to challenge big pharma, corporations, and a general economic structure driven by profit. Her earlier career experience working on the HIV/AIDS crisis in India gives her a deep sense of purpose in tackling an issue that, for many, has newfound importance in the Coronavirus Era. Courtney talks with Priti about how she’s working to sustain the access to medicine movement so that when the next pandemic hits, fewer people die.
Learn more about Priti’s life-saving work at I-MAK. Watch her TEDTalk: Why are drug prices so high? Investigating the outdated US patent system. Read her perspectives on COVID here and here. Her co-founder Tahir Amin discusses “knowledge hoarding” in depth here.
Priti also offers 10 steps the Biden-Harris Administration can take to bring equity into our patent system.
Check out the children’s book Izzy Gizmo, per Priti’s recommendation. Read Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poem “Stanza”, and view the episode transcript.
