the real reason...
if other countries were charged the US prices.
these countries would retaliate by not honoring the patent.
and just make the stuff themselves
Twelve years ago, I got a call to participate in a “mock-jury” at a local hotel in a large Bergen County hotel, where a presentation by both sides of a lawsuit were to be conducted by legal teams broadcast on huge monitors to a sizable audience who (if luckily chosen to make the $200 payment) would then retire to three separate rooms with a large roundtable and discuss the case and ourselves decide on the settlement amount...it was Pfizer vs. two smaller pharm companies, Teva of Israel and Sun of India, concerning a patent infringement case that had already been ten years in the making with no adjudication...it was over an acid reflux drug called Protonix== the lawyers representing Pfizer and the defendants Sun and Teva made highly sophisticated arguments on their behalf. and it was tempting to go with the defendants being sued, until you heard the thoroughly detailed and comprehensive arguments given by the Pfizer team-—absolutely mind-boggling were both side’s displays and presentations, and the amount of $$ and effort that must have gone into them...I don’t know about the other two mock jury decisions, but I was the jury foreman of our jury and we wound up giving about 95 % of the enormous amount of $2.15 BILLION dollars in damages to Pfizer——the REAL trial, to my surprise, took place only a few weeks later (thought it would be later) and the actual amount the real jury wound up giving was nearly identical to ours.Our heads were reeling with all the information presented to us,and we all left with a newly informed sense of just how much money is involved in this area of Big Pharm. unbelievable.