Slidey said:
Did you read my posts?
I'm implying that as much as drug companies might want to patent (or rather, commercialise) an AIDS vaccine or cure, I don't think it is a good political move to do so. At all.
Consider India. Country with the biggest AIDS population in the world (low prevalance rate but a massive population). I doubt it would be happy to hear that AIDS victims need to pay up thousands of dollars if they want to live. India, population as big as China's, army as big as China's, more nukes than China. Now consider 13% of AIDS victims live in India. Then you've got the millions in Africa and Russia to contend with. These places do not seem to me like they are going to say "oh you have a patent, we'll just lie down and die".
Patenting can be pretty fucked, IMO. Take for example the law suit which took place a while back where some 39 pharmaceutical companies
tried to sue South Africa which was trying to ensure cheaper access to certain life saving medications. While the collective prosecutors eventually conceeded that the
TRIPS agreement they waved about did, in fact, permit SA's actions (i.e. it permits
compulsory licensing, whereby competent countries can override patent protection in the case of emergencies, and
parallel importing) their actions nonetheless caused countless individuals to die as a consequence of the several year delay that the lawsuit generated.
After that event, though, I think at least some progress was made at the WTO Doha development round. As a way of spelling things out, the Doha Declaration states "the TRIPS Agreement does not and should not prevent Members from taking measures to protect public health" (from
WHO page). Most relevant, perhaps, is paragraph 5(c), which clarifies the statement that competent governments will be afforded the right to grant compulsory licenses in cases of national emergency (amongst others), stating:
"Each Member has the right to determine what constitutes a national
emergency or other circumstances of extreme urgency, it being
understood that public health crises, including those relating to
HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other epidemics, can represent a
national emergency or other circumstances of extreme urgency."
An issue which remains, however, is that countries with little or no manufacturing capacity are unlikely to be able to make much use of such compulsory licensing because it does not permit countries to export and profit from these licenses (though I'm not clear on the specifics here...). This then means that a) countries can't simply import cheap medicines from other countries making use of compulsory licenses and b) it is hardly viable to set up a pharmaceutical industry from scratch whose goal is to produce dirt cheap products in the absence of an export industry (how are they to be financed?). I don't know whether the WTO has found a solution to this which is deemed 'acceptable' (euphamism for 'economically advantageous'? or are we so idealistic as to read it as 'just'?) by the relevant parties.
For those thinking about whinging about the PBS, pause for a second. We're some of the lucky ones.
