dyslimbic
04-12-2007, 12:48 PM
http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=1091
The looming trial verdict that could kill millions
The aid agencies are warning of "the end of affordable medicine in the developing world"
This week, in one of the glittering courthouses of the New India, a judge will continue to weigh a case that, at first glance, looks dry and technical, but is in fact wet with blood. The verdict will determine whether millions of human beings - from the tip of South America to the top of Africa - live or die.
India today is the developing world's branch of Boots, the place where the poorest people on earth get their medicines. This is because it is, along with Brazil, the only country willing to manufacture cheap copies of corporate-owned drug treatments for cancer, AIDS and other killers, and big enough to do it. Their policy has brought the cost of treating a woman with AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa crashing down from an impossible $10,000 a year in 2000 to a still-tough-but-possible $130 a year today. They can only save so much money - and so many lives - because the Indian government insist they will only pay money to the multi-billion-dollar corporations who own the drug patents if they can show they have really created something genuinely new. Most of the time, they can't - so the Indians sell them to the poor at cost-price.
The court case currently wending through the Indian justice system, launched by the Swiss phramaceutical company Novartis, is an attempt to close down the poor's world pharmacy. Novartis have created a very slightly different version of their leukemia drug Gleevec, and they are trying to force the Indian government to allow them to patent it. The Indian government says the drug isn't really new. It's just a tweak, enabling Novartis to keep the patent "evergreen", continue raking in the profits, and stop the Indians from making a cheap copy at less than a tenth of the price.
If Novartis succeed, the developing world will hit a Pharmageddon, with drug supplies drying up to dying people. AIDS drugs will be particularly vulnerable to this "evergreen" patenting, since they have to be regularly tweaked to deal with an evolving virus. The panicking aid agency Medicin Sans Frontiers (MSF) - who treat 80,000 people in Africa with cheap Indian generics - warn it could mean "the end of affordable medicines in developing countries." In sub-Sharan Africa last year, I held a little lesion-covered six year old girl who lived in an orphanage with two buildings: one for the kids to live in, and the other a morgue. In a typical week, three children move from the first building to the second. This case would put a concrete wall between those kids and the current slow progress in rolling out AIDS treatments.
Of course, Novartis and the other druggernauts say simply: if you don't respect our patents, we can't invent more drugs to save more lives. We are only launching this case out of humanitarian concern. There are several flaws with this. In reality, the pharmaceutical companies don't actually do the vast majority of the research heavy-lifting. As Professor Carlos Maria Correa, the Director of the Centre of Interdisciplinary Studies of Industrial and Economic Law, explains: "In most cases, the discovery of important new drugs is made by public institutions, which later license their development and exploitation to private firms. Basic research that lead to the discovery of 'drug leads' has almost always been publicly funded at universities, in-house government facilities, or research institutes."
This life-saving research will continue whatever happens to Big Pharma's attempted profit-sucking from the developing world. The billions of pounds of profit pharmaceutical companies can make here, in the rich world, is more than enough incentive for the extra (and worthwhile) development work they do on top. Some defenders of the pharmaceutical companies call India's actions "theft". But you don't respect property rights in an imminent public emergency. During the Second World War, the government requistitioned great swathes of public property. In the AIDS crisis, in countries that are facing the death of a whole generation of people, isn't it legitimate to requisition a life-saving idea?
Watching passively while Novartis attacks the poor would be repulsive. Twenty years ago this week, a group was formed to show what we can do to stop them. The American gay activist Larry Kramer founded ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) with the motto "Silence Equals Death". His supporters lay down at the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway, holding up cardboard tombstones. They threw the ashes of their loved ones onto the lawn of the indifferent Reaganite White House. They raided the New York Stock Exchnage to shame pharmaceutical companies failing to act. Today, Kramer says: "There are treatments that can be made available [to the poor] for a pittance, and for the pharmaceutical companies to stop that out of greed is just evil."
We should be following his example. The ashes of African AIDS victims should be thrown onto the Novartis corporate headquarters' lawn. Pensions funds should be lobbied to disinvest. This kind of pressure works: Novartis was one of the 39 companies trying to force South Africa to limit drugs to the poor, until a mass campaign forced them to quit the case in 2001. In the long-term, focusing on one corporation isn't enough: we need to force our governments to change the over-arching international structure - the World Trade Organisation - that coerces poor countries to obey the will of Big Pharma rather than their own dying citizens. Countries like Britain and the US didn't respect international patents until the early twentieth century, when we were far wealthier than Africa today.
But we still have four weeks to force Novartis to pull out of the legal action before the verdict . Go to http://www.msf.org/petition_india/international.html to sign the petition. There is a month - just a month - to save millions of lives.
The looming trial verdict that could kill millions
The aid agencies are warning of "the end of affordable medicine in the developing world"
This week, in one of the glittering courthouses of the New India, a judge will continue to weigh a case that, at first glance, looks dry and technical, but is in fact wet with blood. The verdict will determine whether millions of human beings - from the tip of South America to the top of Africa - live or die.
India today is the developing world's branch of Boots, the place where the poorest people on earth get their medicines. This is because it is, along with Brazil, the only country willing to manufacture cheap copies of corporate-owned drug treatments for cancer, AIDS and other killers, and big enough to do it. Their policy has brought the cost of treating a woman with AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa crashing down from an impossible $10,000 a year in 2000 to a still-tough-but-possible $130 a year today. They can only save so much money - and so many lives - because the Indian government insist they will only pay money to the multi-billion-dollar corporations who own the drug patents if they can show they have really created something genuinely new. Most of the time, they can't - so the Indians sell them to the poor at cost-price.
The court case currently wending through the Indian justice system, launched by the Swiss phramaceutical company Novartis, is an attempt to close down the poor's world pharmacy. Novartis have created a very slightly different version of their leukemia drug Gleevec, and they are trying to force the Indian government to allow them to patent it. The Indian government says the drug isn't really new. It's just a tweak, enabling Novartis to keep the patent "evergreen", continue raking in the profits, and stop the Indians from making a cheap copy at less than a tenth of the price.
If Novartis succeed, the developing world will hit a Pharmageddon, with drug supplies drying up to dying people. AIDS drugs will be particularly vulnerable to this "evergreen" patenting, since they have to be regularly tweaked to deal with an evolving virus. The panicking aid agency Medicin Sans Frontiers (MSF) - who treat 80,000 people in Africa with cheap Indian generics - warn it could mean "the end of affordable medicines in developing countries." In sub-Sharan Africa last year, I held a little lesion-covered six year old girl who lived in an orphanage with two buildings: one for the kids to live in, and the other a morgue. In a typical week, three children move from the first building to the second. This case would put a concrete wall between those kids and the current slow progress in rolling out AIDS treatments.
Of course, Novartis and the other druggernauts say simply: if you don't respect our patents, we can't invent more drugs to save more lives. We are only launching this case out of humanitarian concern. There are several flaws with this. In reality, the pharmaceutical companies don't actually do the vast majority of the research heavy-lifting. As Professor Carlos Maria Correa, the Director of the Centre of Interdisciplinary Studies of Industrial and Economic Law, explains: "In most cases, the discovery of important new drugs is made by public institutions, which later license their development and exploitation to private firms. Basic research that lead to the discovery of 'drug leads' has almost always been publicly funded at universities, in-house government facilities, or research institutes."
This life-saving research will continue whatever happens to Big Pharma's attempted profit-sucking from the developing world. The billions of pounds of profit pharmaceutical companies can make here, in the rich world, is more than enough incentive for the extra (and worthwhile) development work they do on top. Some defenders of the pharmaceutical companies call India's actions "theft". But you don't respect property rights in an imminent public emergency. During the Second World War, the government requistitioned great swathes of public property. In the AIDS crisis, in countries that are facing the death of a whole generation of people, isn't it legitimate to requisition a life-saving idea?
Watching passively while Novartis attacks the poor would be repulsive. Twenty years ago this week, a group was formed to show what we can do to stop them. The American gay activist Larry Kramer founded ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) with the motto "Silence Equals Death". His supporters lay down at the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway, holding up cardboard tombstones. They threw the ashes of their loved ones onto the lawn of the indifferent Reaganite White House. They raided the New York Stock Exchnage to shame pharmaceutical companies failing to act. Today, Kramer says: "There are treatments that can be made available [to the poor] for a pittance, and for the pharmaceutical companies to stop that out of greed is just evil."
We should be following his example. The ashes of African AIDS victims should be thrown onto the Novartis corporate headquarters' lawn. Pensions funds should be lobbied to disinvest. This kind of pressure works: Novartis was one of the 39 companies trying to force South Africa to limit drugs to the poor, until a mass campaign forced them to quit the case in 2001. In the long-term, focusing on one corporation isn't enough: we need to force our governments to change the over-arching international structure - the World Trade Organisation - that coerces poor countries to obey the will of Big Pharma rather than their own dying citizens. Countries like Britain and the US didn't respect international patents until the early twentieth century, when we were far wealthier than Africa today.
But we still have four weeks to force Novartis to pull out of the legal action before the verdict . Go to http://www.msf.org/petition_india/international.html to sign the petition. There is a month - just a month - to save millions of lives.