James Ridgeway: Gore AIDS Scandal - Helps Drug Companies Nix Cheap Medicines

[James Love <love@cptech.org>]

http://www.villagevoice.com/columns/9922/ridgeway.shtml

Gore AIDS Scandal
Helps Drug Companies Nix Cheap Medicines
June 2-8, 1999, the Village Voice

Al Gore, Internet inventor, hog farmer, and tobacco
grower, now has landed in another controversy, leading
the charge for pharmaceutical manufacturers against
South African AIDS patients struggling to get affordable
medicine.

An estimated 3.2 million people are infected with the virus
in South Africa, where the cost of multi-drug therapies-
starting at $1000 a month- is far beyond the means of
most patients, the overwhelming number of them poor
blacks. The average annual income in South Africa is
$2600.

"Medicines to treat HIV/AIDS are far too highly priced for
the mass of our people," Dr. Ian Roberts, adviser to the
South African Health Ministry, said recently. "With up to
16 percent of our people already HIV-positive, this can be
seen as a national disaster."

In an effort to make medicine more available, the South
African government this year passed a law to bypass drug
company patents and permit the import of cheaper drugs.
But the international pharmaceutical industry, led by
U.S.­based companies, sued to overturn the law, and top
U.S. officials led by Gore- who chairs a commission on
South African trade- have joined forces with the drug
companies in threatening South Africa with trade
sanctions.

"Patents are the lifeblood of our industry," David Warr,
associate director of tax and trade policy at Bristol-Myers
Squibb, the New York­based pharmaceutical giant, told
the San Francisco Chronicle. "Compulsory licensing and
parallel imports expropriate our patent rights."

Ralph Nader's Consumer Project on Technology has been
pushing Gore to change his position, and haranguing the
government for its tactics on the matter. Led by Nader, a
group of public-health activists recently wrote the
vice-president a letter, which stated in part: "As an
elected official, indeed, as a human, how would you act if
20 percent of all sexually active young people in the
United States were infected with a fatal disease, and a
foreign country was trying to prevent you from
purchasing drugs on the global market to save money, and
was preventing you from licensing firms to manufacture
lifesaving medicines?"

Gore's response so far has been to step up trade
retaliation against South Africa, threatening trade
restrictions on its exports to the U.S. unless it lines up
behind the drug makers.



-- 
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