The Spectator

NO PROFIT, NO CURE

No profit, no cure: If the patent system for Aids drugs is destroyed, it won't help those in Africa

issue 22 February 2003

Modern-day wizards in the laboratories of the world’s pharmaceutical companies should take a day off from tending their test tubes and concoct a new word for ‘profit’. It is needed because the existing word has been demonised to the point at which Western businessmen hardly dare utter it in public.

At the World Trade Organisation in Geneva this week, a consortium of anti-globalisation pressure groups and well-meaning scientists launched their latest attack in the war against profit. They accuse Western pharmaceutical companies of condemning millions of Africans to an unpleasant death by opposing the production and distribution of cheap anti-retroviral drugs used to treat Aids. The protesters’ argument is this: Aids victims in poor countries cannot afford the expensive drugs produced under patent by Western pharmaceutical companies. Therefore, Western drugs companies should surrender their patents and allow pharmaceutical companies in the Third World to manufacture and distribute cheap, generic versions of the drug.

Typifying the output of the cheap Aids drug lobby, John Sulston, founder director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, wrote in the Guardian this week: ‘This Aids drug thing is simple.

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