| |
Big Drug Companies, Shameful Profits
|
|
|
"Patients Before Patents"
Big Drug Companies, Shameful Profits
|
|
by Richard Gwyn
|
| |
|
FOR THE shareholders of GlaxcoSmithKline, and similarly for its executives, the news couldn't have been better. A week ago this pharmaceutical conglomerate announced record profits for the year 2000 of a whopping $5.8 billion U.S.
But for the shareholders and executives of Glaxo, this same news couldn't have been worse. More exactly, this news couldn't have broken at a worse time.
Here, at the very moment that the company is reporting record profits, it is sending its lawyers into court to plead poverty.
Worse still, Glaxo's financial performance seemed like a direct echo of the slogan that the groups criticizing Glaxo for doing too well out of unwell people have been using to embarrass the company. That slogan is, ``Patients before patents.''
It is the war cry in the latest engagement between the corporate globalism that is the dominant ideology of our times and its opponents in the civil society movement, including in this instance Oxfam and Médecins Sans Frontiéres (Doctors Without Borders).
The specific issue is a court case begun this week by 31 multinational drug companies in an attempt to have declared unconstitutional a law enacted by the South African government that, as the legislation declares, empowers the govern- ment to ``prescribe conditions for the supply of more affordable medicines . . . so as to protect the health of the public.''
The public health that the South African government is attempting to protect is that of its estimated 2.5 million HIV-positive patients.
AIDS/HIV is sweeping across sub-Saharan Africa like a modern equivalent of the Black Death. In all, some 25 million black Africans are HIV-positive (out of some 35 million sufferers in the entire world). In some countries, life expectancy has dropped to 40 from 60 a decade ago. In some parts of the worst-affected countries, the life expectancy of babies born today is a pitiable 28 years.
South Africa may well be the hardest hit. A new, lost generation of orphans, prone to crime because they feel they have no stake in society, is growing up. Shortages of skilled workers are beginning to slow economic growth.
In North America and Europe, HIV patients are treated with an anti-retroviral ``cocktail'' at a cost of $10,000 or more a year. In South Africa, the entire annual health care spending on each person each year is barely $50.
The legislation represents a desperate attempt by the government to secure drugs at prices it can - if not afford, exactly - at least begin to be able to pay for. In response, the Indian generic drug company Cipla is offering South Africa a cocktail of drugs at $350 to $600 per patient, while Brazil has offered to supply generic drug-manufacturing equipment.
South Africa's defiance is beginning to become infectious. Last week, the Jesuit founder of an AIDS hospice for orphans in Kenya's capital, Nairobi, announced that he will buy generic anti-retroviral drugs from Cipla. ``I'm sick and tired of funerals,'' said Father Angelo D'Agostino.
For the drug companies, the market in sub-Saharan Africa, and indeed that in the entire Third World, is irrelevant. It accounts for less than 2 per cent of their global sales.
Their concerns are two-fold: That a precedent set for AIDs drugs will later be extended to other medical areas. That some of the cheap drugs imported into poor countries will be smuggled back into the drug markets that matter - North America and Europe.
Most observers expect that the South African law, which in fact has been poorly drafted, will indeed be ruled unconstitutional. For the drug companies, this victory would almost certainly be a pyrrhic one.
Last year, after the then Clinton Administration announced it would take legal action against the South African government before the World Trade Organization, civic society protestors staged so many demonstrations against presidential candidate Al Gore that the action was cancelled.
The new Bush Administration has confirmed that it won't move against South Africa.
In a public relations counter- strike, the drug companies have cut their prices to Third World countries by as much as 80 per cent (for certain products under certain circumstances). And they've negotiated cheap drug agreements with three African countries, although these are mostly for show, since the agreement with Senegal provides these drugs to just 500 patients.
At whatever cost, these drugs are merely palliatives. A real solution would require the development of an AIDS vaccine.
But since there's now limited demand for it in developed countries, the drug companies are spending only $300 million on vaccine research.
``Patients before patents.'' That's a war cry that's going to become louder and louder.
Copyright 1996-2001. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited
###
|
 Printer Friendly Version
E-Mail This Article
|
|
|
