Welcome to Getting Curious. I'm Jonathan Vanness and every week I sit down for gorgeous conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.

On today's episode, I'm joined by Prithi Kristell, where I ask her, how has our medicine system expired?

Welcome to Getting Curious. This is Jonathan Vanness. I'm so excited to welcome to our show Prithi Kristell. You are a health justice lawyer and you also co-founded IMAC, which is a nonprofit building a more equitable medicine system.

That is a big hard job that you are doing.

Thanks for having me, Jonathan. It is a big job. There's a lot of us doing it. The Access to Medicine's movement, we're all over the world and there are people in every continent who are fighting for a more just medicine system so that treatment and vaccines and testing reaches everybody who needs it.

Okay, so here's the thing. I think that you are such an incredible person to talk to about this because you are a health justice lawyer.

I didn't even know that health justice lawyers existed before. I read about you and listened to some of the podcasts that you've done. I think we all have a stake in obvious access to medicine.

I've lived it as someone who's living with HIV. That is like its whole own other podcast and access to those drugs that it's like a whole other series of podcasts.

But most recently with COVID, you know, we all do have a stake in this. We are all living through this pandemic together.

And the misinformation and the vaccine hesitance has really crept into my life in such a way that I didn't realize that it was going to. I thought that it was something that I was going to read on the news and in reality. It's in friends, it's in family.

I mean, every week there is more people coming out of the woodwork who I love and care for so much. And I am hearing just this heartbreaking stuff that is coming out of them. So I am really determined to figure out more about why this is like this.

And I think that not only can we talk about misinformation and vaccine misinformation, which is a different podcast with a different person.

I think we really need to understand what are vaccines who owns vaccines. And more importantly, what I was thinking about is why is it why is who owns and develops and regulates vaccines so important.

Because that is, that to me is like one of the million dollar questions because it is just such a complicated vast system that I think people are really overwhelmed by and they're scared. People are scared.

And so I feel that you are the person to demystify this. So to start off at its most basic, that's just so you know where I'm coming from.

What is a dang patent? So patents, the original intention behind patents was that they are a time limited monopoly. So if you invent something, we want to motivate you to invent your thing.

And so we're going to reward you with a monopoly. That was the original intention. But today, big corporations hire lawyers, they hire lobbyists, they file as many patents as possible. And they're basically trying to hold on to their monopoly power.

So they can stay the only ones on the market who are in charge of selling their product. And we're seeing the results of that with America's prescription drug pricing crisis. We're seeing it with global COVID vaccine equity.

When you give this much power to a handful of people or actors, it actually can be a problem if there's not checks and balances in the system.

Absolutely. And so you just said a monopoly. And it's like, I thought that when someone had a monopoly on something you had to not pass go and the Supreme Court would strike your monopoly down.

Like, haven't we heard about these monopolies getting broken up before but in the medical field, it's encouraged or it's just like what it is.

I think across the board today, we have a monopoly problem and there's amazing organizations doing work on this open markets institute, American economic liberties project.

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