We as research scientists are
dedicated to containing the threat of HIV/AIDS throughout the world. But even
if we ship large amounts of HIV/AIDS drugs to African governments there is no
guarantee
that the medicines will be distributed to the afflicted. There is no
infrastructure in distributing drugs or maintaining the required medical regimen for
the medicines to work. Look at the corruption! I think we should give directly to hospitals
and to NGOs running hospitals and clinics, not to the Governments.
Let’s ask the US medical schools that have helped with our
clinical studies to apply for a CIPRA
grant
to set up training and treatment facilities in one of these three
countries? We'll promise to provide
free drugs for them (NDWH says they can only treat 50 per clinic- and they
have 5 clinics. We can manage that.).
We’re competing with other
firms to develop an
AIDS vaccine.
As you know,
two vaccines are being tested now in Africa
; ours will be ready for a major clinical trial in about 3
years. If we start now, we can
have clinical trials in Africa in these facilities by that time.
We'll be cooperating globally, with others actually implementing our
programs.
America’s pharmaceutical research
companies have invested almost $100 billion in research
over the past decade. Don't worry about research funding for
us: National Institutes of Health gave a grant to the non-profit
organization that I established--and anything we discover is
channeled to this firm. That means that NIH paid for basic
research--and for the big clinical trials for MEdic and EXit. As
long as we have the non-profit obtaining grants, our corporation is more
profitable.
The down-side is that even
some in the government think that we should lower prices because the public
funded the research. We might have to shift research back to the
company. So, right now we shouldn’t convert production to AIDS
drugs and lose revenue and profits. On the other hand, our costs of
production are a tenth of the sale price.
Do we have any excess capacity? If so, let's use just that capacity, and
change the color of the labels to prevent smuggling.
I have a suggestion:
most companies are giving to African countries hardest hit by AIDS (Botswana,
South Africa).
Why don’t we pick countries where it hasn’t gotten that bad yet? We can make a difference by being
there. I’m thinking of Nigeria, Uganda, and Ghana. All of these were British colonies; some
speak English.
This firm has to lobby
Congress and the President to oppose compulsory
licensing and parallel imports
of
patented drugs. Developing countries, within the framework of the TRIPS Agreement,
can launch generic products in a national emergency. Now they are trying
to say every medical problem is an emergency--cancer, erectile disfunction,
heart problems. We have long-term interests to
protect.
