Pfizer Wei Ge Appeal In China
Written by Stuart Stevens | Tuesday, 13 February 2007 | There is 1 comment
Pfizer Not Giving Up!
We recently reported that the latest Viagra court ruling in China has gone against Pfizer but they are fighting back and have appealed. The latest decision taken by the Chinese courts said that the common name for Viagra in China did not belong to Pfizer but to another drug company and therefore Pfizer were not allowed to use it. In China Viagra is known as Wei Ge which literally means Mighty Brother but a sharp Chinese drug firm beat Pfizer to it and registered the name as its own thus meaning that Viagra can’t market its famous erectile dysfunction product using the name that it is most commonly known by.
Pfizer has had many legal woes in China and only recently had its patent established for the sildenafil citrate drug in China despite the fact that the drug was first marketed in the United States in 1998.
Pfizer argued that this recent ruling in Viagra would send out a bad signal to other companies who were thinking of investing in China. Many fake drugs are made in China and the Chinese authorities despite protestations that they are keen to stamp out the problem have had very little success closing down illegal impotence drug factories and much of the world’s fake Viagra, Cialis and Levitra comes from Chinese factories.
In a few years time China could be the world’s biggest market for erectile dysfunction medication but Pfizer realise that they need the backing of a strong legal structure before they will have any real success with Viagra in China. Until recently many different drug companies were openly making copies of Viagra that looked the same and had the same active ingredient as the real impotence drug.
The Viagra erectile dysfunction medication can claim today to be the most plagiarised and copied drug in the world and this is likely to continue for years to come.
