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 arlier
this month was World AIDS Day. It focused on the role men in developing
nations play in spreading HIV through rape, casual sex, and the
failure to use condoms. UNAIDS, the sponsoring organization, released
a sobering and stark account of how fear, ignorance, and brutality
among men are the major reasons HIV has spread so rapidly throughout
the world, and how prevention is critical to keeping the number
of victims from growing from 40 million people to 60 million over
the next few years.
But guess what?
According to the media — and most major AIDS organizations
— the real causes of the epidemic are high drug prices, and
the patents that prop them up. In the recent round of trade talks
in Doha, Qatar, designed to encourage free trade around the world,
AIDS activists, African countries — which have the most people
infected with HIV (33 million) — and anti-globalization groups
pushed to revise international patent-protection rules to allow
any country to seize any patent, or import any generic drug, so
long as it claimed it had a public health crisis — that could
not be challenged in any forum. And they succeeded in getting the
United States and Europe — which wanted a deal to protect Western-nation
farm subsidies that block developing world competition, and needed
African and Indian complicity to get it — to concede to just
that, all in the name of helping to solve the HIV crisis.
But attacks
on patents have nothing to do with saving the lives of Africans
with HIV. When South Africa urged the World Trade Organization (WTO)
to make AIDS drugs cheaper for the developing world, saying that
the drug industry was putting patents before lives, its health minister
called it a crime against humanity that poor people should die because
life-saving medicines are too expensive. She also cited other methods
for bringing down drug prices, including the use of generic substitutions
of patented drugs, compulsory and voluntary licensing, and parallel
importing (shopping around for cheaper drugs).
But it turns
out that in all of Africa, there were an average of only three patented
— out of a total of 15 — drugs used to treat the disease.
In most countries, it is possible to produce a generic version of
the triple cocktail of HIV drugs considered to be the best treatment
for controlling replication of the AIDS virus. Yet no one has developed
or manufactured such drugs, despite the freedom to do so. And even
at the generic price ($360), the cocktail is still well out of the
reach of many African health budgets.
Everyone grants that cutting the costs of drugs will reduce total
treatment costs. But this has never been the major thrust of the
activist argument. Hence, the same South African health minister
who calls drug prices a crime against humanity also refuses to broadly
distribute nevirapine — a drug now available for free through
its manufacturer, Boerhinger-Ingelheim. Nevirapine reduces transmission
of the virus during labor by up to 50 percent (almost 23 percent
of South Africa's pregnant women are HIV-positive). Meanwhile, the
defense budget for South Africa is $5.5 billion — compared
to $430 million for AIDS. How exactly will a generic industry help
dying infants where free drugs will not?
And if winning
the war against patent protection won't help fight AIDS, what's
the point? James Love of the Consumer Project on Technology, which
is helping to lead this war, wants to apply the declaration made
in Qatar — that poor countries can make generic versions of
drugs — to any medicine, and for any disease. And he wants
the language of the trade agreement to become public policy in every
country. The policy of governments seizing patents and importing
for a public-health crisis "…goes beyond AIDS, malaria
and tuberculosis. Any health care item could be included. We want
to use this in the United States, in Germany and in Switzerland."
Love and his
clique succeeded at doing just that with a little drug called Cipro.
They first found a politician willing to assert that the price of
Cipro was denying Americans access to an essential medicine during
a public-health crisis, and that only patent seizure could solve
the problem. To be sure, price was never a barrier to public access,
and government stockpiling of Cipro alone was never essential to
public health. But the attack on the Cipro patent — led by
Sen. Charles Schumer, with help from Love and the generic drug industry
— was never about public health, any more than the fight about
HIV patents is about ensuring access to AIDS drugs.
The ultimate
goal of the activists is to use patent seizure of all drugs as a
tool for smashing the perceived economic and political power of
pharmaceutical companies worldwide. It is for this reason that activists
and their intellectual attachés maintain that drug development
is really cheap, easy, and largely funded by the National Institutes
of Health. But it's hard to imagine how a largely publicly funded
system of research — which has been outdistanced by private
companies not only in clinical discoveries, but also in basic biomedical
science (such as genomics) — could produce anything that it
hasn't produced in years past to save the world from HIV.
The activists
know that killing patents will kill private investment, and they
see that — not the eradication of AIDS or any other disease
— as their goal. Blinded by their hatred for capitalism, and
for the role of profit in the search for cures, they continually
demand that patents be replaced with more government funding and
a system of licenses to generic drug companies. At bottom, they
are willing to enroll humanity in a clinical trial to determine
this: whether it's possible to kill patents without killing people
in the process. And many politicians and journalists here in America
are ready to volunteer the rest of us — in Africa and America
— for their gruesome experiment. That's a real crime against
humanity.
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