How U.S. trade policy, which forbids local manufacture or low-cost distribution of life daving drugs condemns millions to blighted lives and early deaths in the developing world.
Bruce's Beat: World AIDS Day, the Free Trade Way -
Media, Medicine & Genocide by BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon
"When the White House participates in these dirty drug deals, the result may be genocide."
In the bubble of the American media universe, we are protected from many news stories the whole rest of the world knows about. If we paid close attention on World AIDS Day we do know for instance, that 40 million people now carry the HIV virus worldwide. 25 million are dead from it, with 3 million more deaths each year, and 5 million new infections occurred in 2005 alone. But one thing we might not know is that something less than half the planet's HIV-AIDS cases receive any treatment at all.
Perhaps the biggest AIDS-related story America's corporate media zealously protect us from is the growing global public outrage against US "free trade" policies which condemn millions to sicken and die for lack of access to medications. Since the 1990s, US political leaders have labored tirelessly to block the availability of life saving anti HIV and other drugs to the world's poor. This goes on in trade negotiations, which are generally not covered by the corporate media anyway. But the effect of these policies, according to a growing chorus of public health officials from Canada to Brazil to Thailand and many points in between, are nothing less than genocidal.
"'If you have evidence your inaction is responsible for millions of deaths, you promise to correct that situation, then you fail to deliver, what do you call that... It's not ignorance. It's not mere negligence. It's more than a crime against humanity... It can only be characterized as genocide."
Dr. Julio Mantaner president of the International AIDS Society, the world's leading independent association of HIV-AIDS professionals spoke those words in an interview published last August in the Toronto Globe and Mail. In a recent International Herald-Tribune article Pedro Chequer, head of Brazil's national AIDS program had this observation on US efforts to block access to patented medications in the developing world.
"If you prevent countries from using generic drugs," said Pedro Chequer, the head of Brazil's national AIDS program, "You are creating a concrete obstacle to providing access to drugs. You are promoting genocide, because you're killing people."
"Under Democrats as well as Republicans, the US has insisted on a principle of what is cynically called 'free trade' --- the primacy of ‘intellectual property rights' over human rights."
Anger against US officials under both the Clinton and Bush administrations, which have fought every attempt to lower the price of drugs not just for HIV-AIDS, but for malaria and other common diseases has been building a long time. For the first decade after retroviral drugs were proven effective, prices were far out of reach of most of the world's poor. US officials, acting as sock puppets for drug companies, continue to push for the extension of US patent law, with its monopoly protections for drug companies, across the entire world. Under Democrats as well as Republicans, they have insisted on a principle of what is cynically called "free trade" -- the primacy of "intellectual property rights" over human rights, flexing diplomatic and economic muscles with threats of embargo, sanction, and worse against nations which sought manufacture cheap generic drugs for their own poor and for export.
Finally in 2001 most of the world's poorer countries, along with Brazil, defied the US and walked out of the Doha round of World Trade talks till an agreement was reached that promised to lower the price of anti-HIV drugs more than 98%, from more than $10,000 per year to around $140. This was the Doha Declaration, in which Thailand, Brazil, and a few others were permitted to manufacture limited quantities of a few generic anti-AIDS medications for their own benefit, and most of the export rights for Africa went to a few firms in India. Thanks to Doha, millions of people are alive today who would not otherwise be. Millions of families are intact, with working parents and healthy children able to take advantage of whatever education is locally available.
But now most AIDS activists and public health professionals agree that the promises of Doha, never entirely realized, are being steadily rolled back under relentless US pressure. The Oxfam briefing paper, Patents VS Patients, details how drug prices are being forced steadily upward, low-cost generic exports are being curtailed, and although resistance of the virus to old drugs is growing, pleas to amend agreements to include newer generic alternatives are being vetoed. Deprived of the WTO as an instrument to inflict their monopoly on the globe at one stroke, the favored tactic is for American officials to approach poor countries separately for what are called "bilateral trade agreements." In these one-on-ones with the American bully, you can guess who comes out ahead.
"The promises of Doha are being steadily rolled back under relentless US pressure."
Nations that now produce some of their own anti-AIDS drugs are allowed to continue with limited quantities, but for domestic use only, and required to charge increasing amounts for these. According to the International Herald-Tribune:
"Those who require the essential drugs but cannot afford it, they will have to die," said Dr. Suwit Wibulpolprasert, the Thai official who is coordinating the Public Health Ministry's response to the U.S. proposal.
"...Washington is pushing bilateral and regional trade agreements in which countries enact "superpatents" that prolong U.S. drug makers' monopolies and limit the conditions under which their patents can be broken.
"These new rules, once they are adopted by developing countries, roll back the patent-breaking rights that were confirmed by the 2001 declaration at World Trade Organization talks in Doha, Qatar.
Brazilians, Canadians, Africans and Thais are not the only ones to brand US trade policy as frankly genocidal. No less than Dr. Peter Rost, a former vice-president of the multinational drug firm Pfizer, and now turned whistleblower, freely employs the g-word to describe the Bush gang's collusion with drug companies and its effects on the world's poor. In an article in New Zealand's Scoop which no mainstream US outlet would ever have published, Rost outlines the predicament of drug monopolists, and their strategy to make us all pay:
"...IMS Health, an industry research firm, estimates prescription drugs worth $121.5 billion will come off patent between 2006 and 2011. That's half of U.S. drug sales...
"But the drug company CEO's have a plan to fix all these problems. Just like a bad student might contemplate cheating, the drug industry plans on big scale cheating.
"Number one on the cheat sheet is to stop generics from coming onto the market, in the U.S and overseas...
Dr. Rost, in his article then quotes the same International Herald Tribune article that we have borrowed extensively from:
"The trade deals are often negotiated in secret and attract little notice. But they have already been signed with poor countries overwhelmed by AIDS, among them six in Central America. And negotiations have started with several nations that also are overwhelmed by the AIDS virus, from Thailand to five southern African countries, including South Africa and Botswana."
Rost concludes in his own words;
"When a life-saving industry cheats, people die. When the White House participates in these dirty deals, the result may be genocide."
Since the Stone Age, humans have discovered, developed and used natural and artificial substances - drugs - to treat diseases. Dr. Rost and public health officials from around the planet have it exactly right. Making it difficult or illegal to manufacture and distribute cheap generic drugs while millions die is genocide. Corporations and governments that prevent the treatment of millions of the sick are committing mass murder - are guilty of genocide. And American corporate media who refuse to tell this story are complicit in - are covering up - genocide.
"American corporate media who refuse to tell this story are complicit in - are covering up - genocide."
On this, like so many other issues, the mainstream media are the biggest barriers to thinking globally and acting locally. Rather than serving up truth on World AIDS Day and every other day, the American corporate media dish us images on one channel of the untreatable swamp of misery it claims is Africa and the developing world, while on another channel it sell us red ribbons, adopt-a-child, and AIDS walks.
It's time for us to help each other free our heads and look outside the bubble of mainstream American media. It's time to create and propagate our own media, our own messages, while we work to change the public policy that governs big media as well. Otherwise it won't matter how many of us wear red ribbons each December 1, or take part in HIV and AIDS events. We will all be complicit in genocide.
Bruce Dixon is Managing Editor at BAR, and lives near Atlanta GA. He can be reached at Bruce.Dixon at blackagendareport.com.
This week’s featured author is Sami Schalk. Schalk is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Her book is Black Disability Politics.
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