This is the story of one of the great unspoken scandals of our times. Today, the people across the world who most need life-saving medicine are being prevented from producing it. Here's the latest example: factories across the poor world are desperate to start producing their own cheaper Tamiflu to protect their populations – but they are being sternly told not to. Why? So rich drug companies can protect their patents – and profits. There is an alternative to this sick system, but we are choosing to ignore it.
He then goes on to say:
Our governments have chosen, over decades, to allow a strange system for developing medicines to build up. Most of the work carried out by scientists to bring a drug to your local pharmacist – and into your lungs, or stomach, or bowels – is done in government-funded university labs, paid for by your taxes.
Drug companies usually come in late in the process of development, and pay for part of the expensive, but largely uncreative final stages, like buying some of the chemicals and trials that are needed. In return, then they own the exclusive rights to manufacture and profit from the resulting medicine for years. Nobody else can make it.
Ooh, it all sounds so horrid. So what does he propose is the solution?
This is where the solution to the swine flu mystery comes in. Ordinary democratic citizens were so disgusted by the attempt to deprive South Africa of life-saving medicine that public pressure won a small concession in the global trading rules. It was agreed that, in an overwhelming public health emergency, poor countries would be allowed to produce generic drugs. They are the exact same product, but without the brand name – or the fat patent payments to drug companies in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands.
And what about all those drug companies, what do they do?
drug companies squander a fortune developing "me-too" drugs – medicines that do exactly the same job as a drug that already exists, but has one molecule different, so they can take out a new patent, and receive another avalanche of profits.
Er, Johann ... what, exactly, do you think a "generic" drug is?
This is the FRONT PAGE and LEAD ARTICLE in the Indescribablystupid today. Do these fuckwitted cocktards not have a fucking editor?
8 comments:
Johann Hari could do with a pretty intensive course of Xenical, or its generic equivalent, the fat cunt.
Sometimes Mr Hari can be very perceptive. Today ain't one. As I now no longer need to be artificially nice to the Indy I can say JOHANN FUCK YOU!
I read this article this morning, and my head is still sore from banging it on my desk repeatedly...
For or against patents, Obo?
Hari's an arse bandit, too - his main worry is that there may be no poor african rings for his type to stretch if retrovirals are too strongly protected.
I would say "fuck him", but he'd probably enjoy it, so...
"Impale the fucker!"
Is the Indy still published?
Why?
I agree with him that the taxpayer shouldn't be funding such research, let's leave that to the drugs companies.
The rest is twaddle of course.
These drug companies make profits and pay a shed load of tax. The government collects the tax. If the government wants to use that money to buy drugs and send them to Africa, then good luck to them. it's not what I'd vote for but hey, that's democracy.
Or, the government could keep its nose out and realise that drugs companies work on the basis of discriminatory pricing - they'd be quite happy to sell the stuff in Africa for cost-plus (i.e. a fraction of retail price in the West) provided they knew the Africans wouldn't then re-sell them for much higher prices in the West.
Africans being Africans however, that is exactly what they do, so the drug companies just pull up the drawbridge and tell them to f*** off.
Problem is there is no middle ground. If the poorer countries could manufacture Tamiflu they'd flood the 1st world with it and then the original manufacturers would receive nothing because the market had been shafted by cheap imports....
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