Drug Companies Put Profits Over Lives

pHaze writes: "An article on BBC news says 39 Pharmaceutical companies have taken the South African Government to court to try and block legislation which gives the SA government powers to import or manufacturer cheaper versions of brand-name drugs, specifically HIV and AIDS medication. This is an interesting clash of intellectual property rights versus morality, and if the SA government wins this one (and it looks like they might), does it set a precedent on government's ability to violate international patents at will?"

Comments

Too late for education?

[Dancin_Santa]

The explosive growth of AIDS here in the US came to a halt a few years back when the government made a concerted effort to educate high-risk groups (gays and drug users) about the disease. Then the education stopped and we are back in an upswing. The key, it seems, is the amount of information regarding AIDS that can be transferred to those at-risk groups.

In SA, it is tragic that so many are infected with HIV and AIDS, but it isn't too late to educate the masses. If they do have an education plan it is obviously ineffective.

AIDS is essentially a behavioral disease, it can only be caught (in 5 9 of cases) through risky behavior. Education about safer sex or clean needles or universal testing would go far to stymie the disease's growth.

Providing medicine is like putting out a forest fire with a garden hose. You can stop the symptoms, but the disease spreads unabated. It doesn't help that certain African presidents block AIDS education because they don't believe HIV causes AIDS and want to spend more precious time researching the disease.

Dancin Santa

Re:Too late for education?

[bublina]

I definitely agree with you that education is an important part of disease prevention. However, I disagree that AIDS is a behavioral-only disease. It is true that you can make changes to your behavior to minimize your risk in some case, but there are other ways of contracting the disease that are also very common which you have no control over:

* being born to a parent with HIV and thus having HIV ever since you were born

* getting blood transfusions with infected blood (not a problem in the US, but still a problem in other countries)

* contracting the disease during doctor or dentist visits/surgical procedures (not common in the US, but very common elsewhere)

These are just a few examples. So yes, individuals should be educated about the risk of contracting the disease, but others, especially health care providers, also need to be educated about ways to stop spreading the disease.

Eating the seed corn

[Spamalamadingdong]

Do we take what AIDS drugs we have and say we'll never need any more, or do we give money to the drug companies to make better ones? When you peel off all the layers of "advocacy" and politicking, that's what the issue amounts to.

This is one of the unintended consequences of a combination of factors, including the WTO and the elderly lobby in the USA. The USA does not regulate drug prices (yet), so consumers in the US wind up subsidizing research and development of drugs which then wind up being available much cheaper in places like France and Canada. Medicines are so much cheaper in Canada (due to price controls) that people cross the border to order their prescriptions. The money lost comes straight off the drug companies' bottom line. (They spend a heck of a lot on promotion as well, but given that most of their trials come up duds they have to make it up on the few successes they have.)

AIDS is a horrific phenomenon, but the drug companies are legally responsible for their own survival first and foremost (see "fiduciary duty" and "shareholder lawsuit"). If Brazil and South Africa declare a national emergency and make the patented substances available essentially at cost, the profit disappears in those nations. Not only does this destroy the incentive to market or research for those nations, but under the WTO rules it becomes very difficult to prevent those generic drugs from going to the rest of the world. The drug companies could see their entire market for AIDS drugs wiped out. Their shareholders would demand a pullback from research on the unprofitable sector, and that's it for AIDS drug development. This same phenomenon could spill over to drugs for other conditions. I know there are a lot of people who are strapped to pay for medicine for their conditions, but 40 or even 20 years ago they probably had less-effective drugs with worse side effects or even no drugs at all. For some reason they prefer the new, expensive stuff to the old, cheap stuff that's now generic. What's worse: being broke or being disabled/dead? I hate to put it in those terms but I think I'd prefer being broke.

All in all, it's a really tough situation and it stinks. Mostly it stinks because there's something we can do about it in any individual case, but the scale of the need overwhelms what we can afford. It's not unlike trying to keep a nation full of old people alive; no matter how much money you throw at it you are not going to eliminate the problem because it keeps getting worse at the margins. Solution? I wish I had a solution that was both palatable and affordable without any dangerous pitfalls for the future.

One thing that is certain: the person who never contracts HIV (or Ebola, or tuberculosis) is never going to need treatment. Prevention should be at the top of every nation's priority.
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Re:Eating the seed corn

[caffeinated_bunsen]

You make some valid points, but there are some problems with applying them to South Africa. There is virtually no market for AIDS drugs in South Africa at current prices. The vast majority of people with the disease would have to work for several weeks to afford one day's worth of treatment. The choice of being broke or dead is not even available to these people; they're already broke. The choice is being broke, dead, and not pissing off the drug companies, or being broke, alive, and irking large American corporations.

Profits from drug sales are definitely essential to researching new treatments. The important thing is that no significant profit is currently being made in South Africa, so there's no profit to be immediately lost by selling those patients drugs at low cost. The only way for them to lose money is if the low-cost drugs take the place of high-cost versions in markets that can actually afford the higher priced drugs. The drug companies are not sacrificing those thousands or millions of lives for the sake of research into future treatments. They are not even doing it to protect next year's bottom line. They are allowing every one of those people to die simply to make it clear that they control the prices, and they'll change them if and only if they want to.

I do have to agree completely with your last point, though. Education and prevention are more important than anything else.

Re:Eating the seed corn

[puppet10]

I have a question about this, how much of the research that led to the development of these drugs was taxpayer (US and other countries, and WHO) funded? I believe the US through NIH and other institutions provides a significant amount of research and information that the drug companies most likely use. Are the taxpayers compensated for this expense when we grant an exclusive monopoly to produce the substance?

I'm not saying that the drug companies should not be able to profit, just that the research done at taxpayer expense should be in someway factored into the amount the drug company is able to profit from a drug where the choices are pay the price they set or die.

Re:Eating the seed corn

[Schwarzchild]

You make some valid points, but there are some problems with applying them to South Africa. There is virtually no market for AIDS drugs in South Africa at current prices. The vast majority of people with the disease would have to work for several weeks to afford one day's worth of treatment. The choice of being broke or dead is not even available to these people; they're already broke. The choice is being broke, dead, and not pissing off the drug companies, or being broke, alive, and irking large American corporations.

That is correct. Your average South African bloke cannot afford the treatment so they only have one option and that is to die.

In fact, many clinics/doctors/organizations in Africa cannot even afford to buy any significant amount of such drugs.

60 minutes presented an excellent review of what is currently happening in Africa with regards to the pharmaceutical industry. They noted that India has no patent law for drugs (because apparently the government in a fit of charity does not allow that to happen so that their people can afford drugs) and that a prominent drug company in India, which manufactures generic versions of the drugs that are made in America, is selling these low cost medicines to African countries. They also noted that the large pharma corps were trying to stop the Indian company from selling their drugs in Kenya among other places. They focused on "sleeping death" in the segment and how people were dying there but they had no money with which to buy the medicines. They later interviewed a spokeperson for the pharma industry who said that they are for profit entities and that the activists/doctors/patients should be talking to their government to foot the bill.

I do not disagree with the idea that the pharmaceutical industry should be able to turn a profit to enable their continued research into new medicines but really now it is awful for them to try to block the Indian company from selling these low cost alternatives. After all, they have no market in those countries in the first place.

more info

[danny]

More information about this case (and the broader issue of drug costs) is available from Oxfam, which is running a "Cut the Cost" campaign.

• Oxfam GB
• Oxfam Community Aid Abroad (Australia)

Educate South African President Thabo Mbeki...

[alienmole]

The problem is the leadership. Until fairly recently, AIDS education was virtually nonexistent, due to a complex set of cultural beliefs, e.g. "AIDS education encourages promiscuity". President Mbeki has also famously questioned the link between HIV and AIDS, even invoking the US CIA as a co-conspirator in a global conspiracy.

Now Mbeki wants to blame the drug companies. Regardless of the moral issues of drug company pricing strategies, South Africa's problems will not be solved until its leadership faces them head on and stops trying to allocate blame and make excuses. Lack of leadership on this issue is the major reason that 1 in 9 South Africans are infected with HIV, and 1 in 5 pregnant women in Soweto township are HIV positive.

Thabo Mbeki is a big part of the problem. It's a pity that the African National Congress (ANC) couldn't find a more worthy successor to Nelson Mandela.