[Marxism] (no subject)

[Sudhir Devadas <sudhirdin@xxxxxxxxx>]

one has to applaud the courage behind the cipla chairman's resolve to
challenge the inhuman insistence of roche on exploiting its rights to
a life-saver. profits, above all.

sudhir


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Their Patents or Your Life
By Joel Bleifuss        December 1, 2005                                In
These Times
Have you heard about that bird flu? The threatened pandemic, should it
occur, will kill in a worst-case scenario 150 million people,
including 7 million Americans. The resulting mountain of skulls would
dwarf those piled up in all the wars of the 20th Century.
Yes, it's scary stuff. People who research the virus say the question
is when, not if, the pandemic will occur. And former Health and Human
Services Secretary Tommy Thompson describes the avian flu as "a really
huge bomb." The flu kills about 50 percent of the people it infects by
attacking the lungs and causing hemorrhage. Healthy young people,
those with the strongest immune systems, are most at risk.
To date, only one known drug can ward off death, and that is Tamiflu.
With all of this now widely known, one might expect the Bush
administration--having failed to stop the 9/11 hijackers and having
just eked through the post-Katrina debacle--to mobilize national
resources to ensure that enough Tamiflu was on hand to treat every
man, woman and child in the United States.
But it can't. It doesn't own the intellectual property rights to
Tamiflu. Those rights are controlled by the Swiss pharmaceutical giant
Roche Holding AG, which is only able to produce limited quantities of
the medicine.
So when the pandemic hits, should you or yours be among the millions
who drown in their own blood, take comfort in the fact that the sacred
rights of private property survived.
A hyperbolic rant? Well, if you lived in the poorer regions of the
planet and were among the millions of people infected with HIV or
living with AIDS, you would be facing a similar situation. The drugs
that save the lives of HIV-infected people in wealthy countries
weren't available to most of the 3 million people who died this past
year of AIDS. In fact, of the estimated 6 million people in the world
with AIDS, only 1 million are on an adequate drug regime--and that
does not take into account the millions more who don't have AIDS but
are HIV-positive.
Poor countries have attempted to find ways around drug patents, though
at every step of the way they have met fierce resistance from both the
pharmaceutical corporations and the Bush administration. Brazil, which
was paying 70 percent of the national AIDS budget to buy
antiretroviral medicines from three drug companies, had to threaten to
violate patent law in order to negotiate a lower price. And India,
where companies were breaking international property rights law and
manufacturing generic anti-retroviral drugs, shut down such factories
as part of its agreement to join the WTO.
Similarly, as the world ponders a potential bird flu pandemic, people
are beginning to question just how sacred property rights are. U.N.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan, speaking at the World Health
Organization headquarters in Geneva said, in reference to Roche, that
the U.N. should be "making sure that we do not allow intellectual
property to get into the way of access of the poor to medication ... I
wouldn't want to hear the kind of debate we got into when it came to
the HIV anti-retrovirals." In Washington, Sen. Charles Schumer
(D-N.Y.) warned, "Roche is putting their own interests ahead of world
health. If they don't begin to actually license the patent for Tamiflu
to dramatically increase worldwide production, I am going to pursue a
legislative remedy."
The chairman of Cipla, the Bombay company whose production of generic
anti-AIDS drugs was stopped when India joined the WTO, told the New
York Times, "Right or wrong, we're going to commercialize and make
oseltamivir [generic Tamiflu]." And in Tawain, which is not a member
of the WTO, the National Health Research Institute has already begun
manufacturing a generic Tamiflu.
"It's lives or patents," Institute president Cheng-en Wun told the New
Zealand Herald. "We value intellectual property, but we have chosen
life."
When will we?

Joel Bleifuss is the editor of In These Times, where he has worked as
an investigative reporter, columnist and editor since 1986. Bleifuss
has had more stories on Project Censored's annual list of the "10 Most
Censored Stories" than any other journalist.

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