Define EVERGREEN:

Caught this on twatter: https://twitter.com/Mareq16/status/1228035195619684352

Evergreen - Depopulation

We now have a link to Coronavirus via Novartis

n the pharmaceutical trade, when brand-name companies patent “new inventions” that are really just slight modifications of old drugs, it’s called “evergreening.”

Excerpt: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3680578/

As any would-be inventor knows, coming up with something the world has never seen before can be tough. Tweaking something old and calling it new, on the other hand, is considerably easier.

In the pharmaceutical trade, when brand-name companies patent “new inventions” that are really just slight modifications of old drugs, it’s called “evergreening.” And it’s a practice that, according to some who have looked into it, isn’t doing a whole lot to improve people’s health.

“Typically, when you evergreen something, you are not looking at any significant therapeutic advantage. You are looking at a company’s economic advantage,” says Dr. Joel Lexchin, a professor in the School of Health Policy and Management at York University in Toronto, Ontario.

“The response from the brand side is that they are trying to protect their markets so they can further invest in R&D [research and development]. And even if they make a modification to a drug, doctors are still quite able to prescribe the generic version of the older product. Having said that, the brand-name companies put an awful lot of money into marketing the newer version, and that marketing is designed to affect what doctors do.”

Evergreening has been a hot topic of late because of the recent ruling by India’s Supreme Court to refuse to grant Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis a patent for a new version of its cancer drug Gleevec (imatinib mesylate), or Glivec, as it’s known in some countries. Novartis claims the drug is more easily absorbed into the blood and, considering it is used to fight leukemia, that is enough of an improvement to warrant patent protection. But India’s trade and industry minister, Anand Sharma, has defended the decision, and was quoted by Agence France-Presse as saying it was “absolutely justified under the law” and that India’s patent law “does not accept evergreening.”