A kinda friend in Big Pharma

[mecch]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/health/09prof.html?8dpc

Ally for the Poor in an Unlikely Corner
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: February 8, 2010

From the article:
Now Glaxo is ranked No. 1 on the Access to Medicine Index created in 2008 by an organization based in the Netherlands that rates pharmaceutical companies on their stances toward the poor much as Transparency International ranks countries on corruption.

Glaxo has cut deals with drug makers like Dr. Reddy’s in India and Aspen Pharmaceuticals in South Africa to support their new drugs and jointly market Glaxo brands.

It is teaching Brazil’s state vaccine company, Fiocruz, how to brew its new pneumococcal vaccine.

Last year, in a speech to Harvard medical students, Mr. Witty promised to keep the prices of all Glaxo drugs in poor countries to no more than 25 percent of what was charged in rich ones, and to donate one-fifth of all profits made in poor countries toward building their health systems.

And on HIV/AIDS:

Mr. Witty still has critics. Daniel Berman, who a decade ago co-founded Doctors Without Borders’ Access Campaign, said that Glaxo’s work on transferring vaccine technology to middle-income countries was “still a lot of smoke and mirrors” and could go faster, that the Tres Cantos lab “still doesn’t have a big enough budget to make a difference” and that putting drugs for neglected diseases into a patent pool was “a bit silly” since no one fought for the patent rights anyway.

“If they were seriously interested in patent pools,” Mr. Berman said, echoing a criticism voiced by Oxfam as well, “they’d try out the Unitaid one.”

(Unitaid, a European agency using an airline ticket tax to buy drugs for poor countries, has offered to oversee a pool of patents on AIDS drugs so new combination pills can be made cheaply.)

Mr. Witty counters that AIDS is not just a disease of the poor and that Glaxo needs to keep making profits in rich and middle-income countries. The company lets Indian and African counterparts make its drugs without paying royalties, and they produce four times as many pills as Glaxo does.

The company, Mr. Witty said, is “very much aligned with Unitaid’s goal and now in cordial negotiations with them.”

“But we want to hammer out the details,” he continued.

[newt]

hmmm

good, but they make crap HIV drugs and refuse to admit abacavir doubles the risk of heart attack (see new study for even more details....)

- matt

[Boo Radley]

hmmm

good, but they make crap HIV drugs and refuse to admit abacavir doubles the risk of heart attack (see new study for even more details....)

- matt

Hmmmm is right!

I was composing a trenchant diss of the "smoke and mirrors" while admitting something is probably better than nothing... if there truly is something

but I'm a GSK baby!  In October, 2004 I began a clinical trial using twice a day Trizivir or Combivir and some PI and ended up in the Triz group.  It's all I've used since.  (The trial was to have ended in September, 2005 but the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers kept this area's data null, void, and in many cases washed away.)  Where are these alleged studies allegedly published, in non-Capitalist countries no doubt, rendering them questionable at best.   If Robert Gallo is/wasn't involved it's not true science.  I like the concept of niche marketing for HIV and other "ignobly ignored" diseases to let richer countries pay higher prices -- then odd words drift into my libidinal consciousness (money turns me on) "by each according to ability ... to each according to need" or something like that.  I don't read Communist propaganda.

AnyWTF, I just put my right heel on top of my King Cake slice and need to determine its edibility.  Since several countries mentioned in the article have been manufacturing their own HIV meds under threat of patent infringement law suits & retribution it seems pragmatic to get in on whatever is going on rather than chance losing or getting less.  At least as a rabid free-market Capitalist these tenets I believe, under god, with nice guys always finishing last.  Social Darwinism is gospel truth but Darwin's Theory of Evolution has no proof whatsoever.  Ask Peter Duesberg, close personal friend and confidante of the late Christine Maggiore & her late 3 year old daughter Eliza Jane Scovill.

I'm punch-drunk.   Sleep