Let the government override patents on unaffordable, federally funded drugs
Health care
Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes. Others must also act.
Why shareholder democracy is necessary
Only the government can license a patent over its owner's objection, so the legal mechanism here is governmental. Corporate conduct still matters: companies can voluntarily license or price federally funded drugs affordably, which would make overrides unnecessary. The industry's lobbying is the primary obstacle to any such authority. Public Citizen documented 394 individual lobbyists working in 2025 to shield drugs from federal price measures, with Novartis, PhRMA and BIO leading. Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility members filed proposals at nine drugmakers in December 2022, including AbbVie, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, asking boards to assess how patent thickets restrict patient access before extending exclusivity. A documented obstacle also stands outside corporate reach. The major university associations (AAU, APLU, AAMC and AUTM) formally urged the government in February 2024 to withdraw its framework for exercising this authority. These nonprofit patent holders answer to no shareholders.
How this was scoredNecessary
Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes. Others must also act.
We have not yet written down the two answers behind this rating. Recording them on every item, so a reader can check the reasoning and not only the conclusion, is work in progress.
Every rating is the higher of two answers, one for what companies do and one for what they spend to stop the outcome, because the same vote reaches both. See the full method.
Sources
- On Healthcare Costs: In Battleground States and Districts, Republicans and Democrats Agree On Proposals to Lower Prices, Expand Coverage, Program for Public Consultation / Voice of the People, 2026 (national survey February 11-26, 2026)
- Hundreds of Lobbyists Hired to Undermine Drug Price Negotiations, Public Citizen, 2025-11
- Shareholders Ask Nine Pharma Companies to Report on Whether Patent Protections Are Reducing People's Access to Medicines, Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, 2022-12-12
- Letter from Higher Education Associations Urging NIST to Withdraw the Draft March-In Rights Framework, American Council on Education, with AAU, APLU, AAMC, AUTM and COGR, 2024-02-01
What civil society organizations are helping owners on this
Coordinated member proposals at seven drugmakers for the 2024 proxy season asking boards to weigh the access impact of extended patent exclusivity before seeking secondary patents and to adopt human rights due diligence on affordability.
4 campaigns on record
Establish a board process to evaluate how extended patent exclusivities affect patient access before applying for secondary or tertiary patents, and adopt human rights due diligence covering access and affordability.
With Trinity Health, T1International, Mercy Investment Services, Seventh Generation Interfaith Coalition
Result: not stated in source
Establish and report on a process by which the impact of extended patent exclusivities on product access would be considered in deciding whether to apply for secondary and tertiary patents.
Result: SEC denied Regeneron's no-action request, finding the proposal transcends ordinary business; the board urged a vote against; vote result not stated in source
Regeneron shareholders to vote on pharma patent proposal, Governance Intelligence, 2023-04
Proposals asked companies to examine whether stacking secondary and tertiary patents on existing drugs (a strategy investors said AbbVie used to extend Humira's exclusivity to 19 years through 130 patents and 27 price increases) was limiting patient access, to align lobbying with stated access commitments, and, at Moderna and Pfizer, to study transferring vaccine-manufacturing know-how so generic versions could be made.
Result: Sixteen proposals were originally filed; twelve survived company challenges at the SEC and went to a vote. Two proposals at Amgen were withdrawn after the company reached an agreement with the filers; two other proposals, at Pfizer and Moderna, were also withdrawn.
Amgen's agreement with the filers led those two proposals to be withdrawn rather than voted on; the source describing this did not specify what Amgen committed to do, and we found no further documentation of that commitment.
At Moderna and Pfizer, asked the board to commission a third-party report analysing the feasibility of promptly transferring intellectual property and technical know-how so that additional qualified manufacturers in low and middle income countries could produce COVID-19 vaccine doses. At Johnson & Johnson, asked the board to report on whether and how its subsidiary Janssen's receipt of government financial support for developing and manufacturing vaccines and therapeutics affected access to them.
With People's Vaccine Alliance
Result: All three proposals were voted down at meetings held on 28 April 2022. Moderna's Proposal 4 drew 70,878,392 votes for and 227,007,857 against, with 1,518,730 abstentions and 34,671,090 broker non-votes, which is 23.8% of the votes cast for and against. Pfizer's Item 6 drew 1,023,141,083 for and 2,714,524,824 against, or 27.4%. Johnson & Johnson's Item 8 drew 616,715,019 for and 1,207,732,861 against, or 33.8%. Oxfam put the Moderna figure at 24 percent of the nominal vote and 29 percent of the independent vote, once the 17 percent held by the company's directors and senior executives is set aside, and said it was the first time shareholders had voted for a resolution of this kind on any company proxy ballot.
We found no change by any of the three companies that a source we opened attributes to these votes. Johnson & Johnson did not announce vote totals at its meeting and filed them with the Securities and Exchange Commission afterwards. The account of company responses that the earlier version of this row carried, on doses to COVAX and the African Union, the Biovac partnership and nonprofit-basis distribution, rested entirely on a Fierce Pharma article that no longer opens, live or through the Internet Archive, so it is not restated here.
Related subjects on other maps
How this rating was made
Every item on every one of our maps is read against one question: how far does this depend on the people who own companies voting their values? We answer it twice, once for what companies do and once for what they spend to stop the outcome, and take whichever answer is higher, since the same vote reaches both. The score carries its reasoning and its sources so that a reader can check it rather than take it.
- Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
- Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes, and others must also act.
- Helpful. Owners voting their values help, and others carry most of it.
- Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.
The advocacy record on this page holds only what a source we opened says happened. Where we searched and found nothing, the page says so rather than leaving a silence. Where a campaign names a filer the source does not name, it says that too. Ratings are ours; the list of subjects is Common Ground of the American People's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.