Aspectos de colonialidade da propriedade intelectual relacionados à saúde: reflexões desde e para o sul global a partir da pandemia de COVID-19

Abstract

Even after the political independence of the colonies, coloniality remains a pillar of the current global pattern of power, configured as the coloniality-capitalism-eurocentrism plot. If coloniality is designed to go unnoticed, moments of crisis can help reveal it. In the Covid-19 pandemic, this seems to be precisely what has happened with the global intellectual property (IP) system. Its colonial logic has been exposed in the scandalous inequality of access between the Global North and South to anti-Covid-19 health technologies and in the debates and decisions to circumvent the problem. This work aims to present elements from the global and Brazilian experience that contribute to supporting a hypothesis commonly intuited within the so-called "global movement for access to medicines" (A2M), but still little systematized: that the current IP system is configured as an expression and device of coloniality for people’s health. The main lens of analysis is the Latin American decolonial thinking, but also theoretical developments of the so-called cognitive capitalism. In an attempt to get closer to “another” methodology - creative and reflective - three case studies were combined with a narrative review of literature from different fields of knowledge. In case study 01, the speeches of participants in the debate on pharmaceutical and biotechnology patents in the National Parliament were analyzed and compared at two different historical moments, relating to the processing of Laws No. 9,279 of 1996 and 14,200 of 2021. In case study 02, the impact of the extinction, in May 2021, of the sole paragraph of article 40 of Law 9.279/96 on patent applications of interest to Productive Development Partnerships (PDP) was studied. Case study 03 sought to find out the perceptions of representatives of the Brazilian A2M on the fight to tackle the effects of intellectual property in the Covid-19 pandemic, including Law No. 14,200 of 2021. In the light of Latin American decolonial thinking associated with the developments of cognitive capitalism and the results of the case studies, the current global IP system reveals itself as a Eurocentric and capitalist global structure for maintaining and deepening coloniality, especially in its current phase of domination by corporations and a policy of consumers-entrepreneurs of their own health, as evidenced by Covid-19. The experience of the Brazilian MAM points to the importance of making the coloniality of IP explicit, as well as the limitation of strategies for confronting the effects of IP on public health that do not seek to break with the colonialities of power, being and knowledge. Decoloniality has the potential to inspire a re- enchantment of the Brazilian MAM in its struggle to defend people's health.