Patent Games
The activist attack on medical progress.

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.