Washington Times on Gore and AIDS and Africa/ from the Kaiser AIDS summary

[James Love <love@cptech.org>]

#6   COMPULSORY LICENSING II:   ARE GORE, DRUG COMPANIES TEAMING
     UP AGAINST SOUTH AFRICA?
     In Sunday's Washington Times, London-based columnist Gwynne
Dyer discusses what she calls Vice President Gore's "complicity
with the U.S. pharmaceutical industry's campaign to crush South
Africa's attempt to break out of the global-pricing system -- a
system guaranteeing that most South African AIDS victims will die
quickly and without access to the drugs that could save them." The drug 
companies, she explains, separate the globe into zones
based upon what an average customer in the middle class can pay. Thus,
an 
American patient pays several times more than a Polish
patient, who pays more than an Indian patient.  But in "order for
this profit-maximizing strategy to work, the drug companies must
ensure that the drugs do not pass from one zone to another," as
South Africa tried to do with its 1997 Medicines Act.  While the
country can manufacture the drugs under international law, it can
only do so under a license that "compels it to charge close to
First World prices," due to the skewed income average created by
wealthy South Africans.  Ironically, though, most South Africans
"have an annual income that fits the Indian profile, so why
shouldn't it import its anti-AIDS drugs from there?"  For his
part, Dyer writes, Gore "receives notably fewer campaign
contributions from South African AIDS victims than he does from
American drug companies."  She concludes:  "With any luck, he
will lose this fight.  And, to be fair, he won't mind a bit.  His
heart is in the right place, but he dares not put his mouth
there" (Dwyer, Washington Times, 7/11).


-- 
James Love, Director, Consumer Project on Technology
I can be reached at love@cptech.org, by telephone 202.387.8030,
by fax at 202.234.5176. CPT web page is http://www.cptech.org