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

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. It’s a chance to dip our well-fed toes in the water, by actually using our collective discoveries and inventions to benefit humanity.’ Sulston shared the Nobel prize for medicine last year, but it is unlikely he will be appearing on the shortlist for the Nobel prize for economics. Two years ago, the World Trade Organisation gave Third World governments permission to ignore international law on patents in the case of life-saving drugs for use within their own countries. The result has been predictable: while some of the generic drugs have been getting through to their intended users, others have been diverted to Western markets by the bandit regimes which control a fair part of Africa.

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