Brief: Probably it is not a coincidence that a few days before the American leftist newspaper The New York Times produced an editorial with the even more demagogic title “Brazil’s Right to Save Lives”, inducing to the deceptive concept that it is all and only a problem of saving lives and not a deeper ideological drive with which NYT seems to agree.
In the midst of a deeply serious political crisis broken loose by heavy suspicion of corruption involving some of highest ranking Presidential aides and allies, President Lula and Health Minister Humberto Costa took a dangerous and demagogic step in trying to spin up his downward popularity. In a long awaited – and almost certain – decision, anti-retroviral treatment medicine would have its patent broken, in an open assault at Intellectual Property (IP). The measure was announced with great pomp and circumstance at July 8, as a very courageous act of sovereignty, dignity and nothing less but mandatory of the President as the first-defendant of the right of the Brazilian people to health. Although having given a week to Abbott Laboratories to lower the list price of its anti-HIV drugs, the Health Minister said, in a bombastic manner, that what is done, is done. Officials from Brazil s health ministry have also met with Merck & Co. over the past two years to press the company to lower prices for its patented AIDS drug Efavirenz, said João Sanches, communications director for the Brazilian unit of Merck. “We re willing to negotiate, we ve already contributed a lot, but there s a limit, said Sanches, who has participated in meetings with Brazilian authorities.
However, an agreement was reached at with Abbott Laboratories to reduce Kaletra s per-pill price from $1.17 to 99 cents on July 8. Three days later, President Lula named a new health minister, Saraiva Felipe, who demanded a bigger reduction. The government says it will manufacture the drug at a cost of 41 cents a pill if the fourth- largest U.S. drug maker refuses.
Brazil supplies drugs for free to as many as 163,000 victims of AIDS and HIV, the retrovirus that causes the disease. An estimated 23,400 people in Brazil use Kaletra (a protease inhibitor that blocks an enzyme involved in the virus s replication, slowing its progression to AIDS), making it the drug s biggest market outside the developed world.
But I don’t believe that even if the drug manufacturers come to agree with the Government s proposal, in the long run it will not back up, for it is not a matter of prices at all but it is considered a “right of a Government to do what is best for its people and that this should not be a matter to be submitted to market considerations”. Indeed, it is not, for a few months earlier, Brazil flatly rejected a 40 million dollars offer made by the American government: money to be used exactly in AIDS treatment and prevention. The Brazilian government s refusal was based on some minor issues regarding moral values, which were deemed as a major conservative insult to its liberal stand.
Yes, that measure was inevitable due to socialist ideology, the very trademark of Brazilian rulers for the past ten years, although deepened under Lula’s Presidency. However, the urgency with which it was adopted showed that the Government had to produce something positive at once to at least save its face.
Probably it is not a coincidence that a few days before the American leftist newspaper The New York Times produced an editorial with the even more demagogic title “Brazil’s Right to Save Lives”, inducing to the deceptive concept that it is all and only a problem of saving lives and not a deeper ideological drive with which NYT seems to agree. In fact, it is reasonable to suspect that the world left is one and the same and actions are, in some way, coordinated. This is not a matter of anti-HIV but of anti-Intellectual Property as a whole, anti-capitalistic, anti-free market and ultimately against freedom and democracy, the deepest and soundest foundations of Western Civilization. "Saving lives" is a humane appeal that now serves mostly to hide common theft and piracy that put under jeopardy a great number of other properties as well. His is the same government that ruled that productive rural property can be sacked and occupied for “social reasons”.
These ideas are spreading faster worldwide through UN procedures, NGO’s and the leftist press, and that include grossly distorted and plainly false statistics. Those immoral appeals, implying that a country has the right to produce its own medicines does not take into consideration the high costs of medical researches: on average, 800 million dollars and 10 to 15 years to commercialize a new effective drug. According to Dr Graham Smith from Merck Lab, of 1,200 molecules tested to evaluate healing properties only eight went on to the next step and not all of them will ever become effective drugs. This means that the most important values added to a drug are human intellectual investment and efforts, whose property deserves to be protected.
But all this means nothing to our ideology-driven bureaucrats – ever so happier with the high taxes that make possible their high salaries– always ready to raise tariff barriers to “protect us” against foreign ‘invasion’. It makes sense that the communist controlled lab FAR MANGUINHOS was selected to industrialize the medicines that had their patents broken. This shows the hypocrisy for the same institution has its products protected by patents registered in Brazil and abroad; including not only intellectual property but also the right to produce any medicine considered of public interest! The Brazilian government is saying: my property belongs to me, your property belongs to me too.
Actually FAR MANGUINHOS has being for the last decades a kind of feud to Brazilian Communist Party. Later on this party changed its name to Popular Socialist Party [PPS] but it still retains the same feuds as before. Only recently with the rupture of the alliance between PT and PPS the former established a more tight control over it.
Those inconsequential decisions may turn into a boomerang strike back at the country, for apart retaliatory measures to be adopted by the US through WTO, if it turns to be a modus operandi adopted by other countries in the not so far future it tends to paralyze high level research for lack of funding. For a country that lacks research means of its own, that means suicide!
Already this threat has prompted Abbott to delay plans to invest $27 million remodeling a plant in Brazil, a company spokeswoman said. U.S. Representative Mark Steven Kirk, a Republican from the district where the Abbott Park, Illinois-based company is located, said he would respond to a violation of Abbott s patent by proposing legislation to cancel trade preferences for $2 billion of Brazilian exports.
Decisions risks their desired goal to cut cotton and agricultural subsidies, something President Bush supports when the World Trade Organization meets later this year for their Ministerial meeting in Hong Kong. Acts of defiance against protecting intellectual property could force President Bush to seek further trade sanctions against Brazil at the WTO Ministerial meeting – an action that would have drastic consequences for Brazil’s economy when combined with U.S. trade sanctions.
(*) Médico Psiquiatra e Psicanalista no Rio de Janeiro. Membro da International Psychoanalytical Association e Clinical Consultant, Boyer House Foundation, Berkeley, Califórnia, e Delegado Internacional no Brasil do Drug Watch International. Possui trabalhos publicados no Brasil e exterior.
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"Quando todas as armas forem propriedade do governo, este decidirá de quem serão as outras propriedades." Benjamin Franklin
