Winning the Fight against AIDS
The past decade has seen remarkable progress in the fight
against AIDS, with many new treatments discovered and more in development.
Some people in the public health community now say that
AIDS could be reclassified as a chronic disease that is manageable like
diabetes or hypertension.
Until recently, such thoughts were unimaginable.
Despite this progress in treatment, 2.5 million people
will be infected with HIV this year and more than two million will die of AIDS.
As long as weak infrastructure and disastrous political interference plague
poor countries where the disease hits hardest, AIDS will persist.
Frustrated global activists are now demanding that
developing countries be allowed to revoke the patents on AIDS medications to
make them more available.
Already, the pharmaceutical industry funds many
philanthropic programs to make medicines available in these countries at little
or no cost.
But activists want to impose “compulsory licensing,” a
practice endorsed by the World Trade Organization, to allow governments to
break patents during public health emergencies to produce copies of branded
drugs.
This may sound like an effective way to get antiretroviral
drugs to the world’s poor, but it isn’t.
In fact, it could have deadly consequences.
The immediate danger would come from the proliferation of
low-quality counterfeits.
Most local industries in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast
Asia lack the technological and regulatory incentives to produce high-quality
pharmaceuticals.
When a drug is manufactured in a facility that doesn’t
meet international safety standards, the drug may contain the wrong dosage of
medication. If an AIDS patient takes medicine that isn’t strong enough to kill
the disease, the virus becomes drug resistant.
Exposing HIV/AIDS patients to substandard products worsens
the epidemic and increases treatment costs.
In 2005, for example, many AIDS patients in Thailand
suffered and died after treatment with an untested antiretroviral cocktail
called GPO-vir, produced by Thailand’s Government
Pharmaceutical Organization.
Despite this failure, many activists support the Thai
government’s efforts to copy other antiretroviral drugs developed by
pharmaceutical companies.
In addition to this awful death toll, patent violations
could lead to a decline in the number of new vaccines in the future, since drug
companies would have no assurance of a return on their investments.
On average, it takes more than 10 years and $800 million
to bring a new drug to market.
No company could afford that cost if international patent
theft made it impossible to recoup the investment. It’s a simple concept — as
patent protection wanes, so does the incentive to produce vital new drugs.
Most activists who support compulsory licensing actually
recognize this. But their solution is highly flawed.
They want to replace the patent system with “prizes” for
drug discoveries and “patent pools” that subsidize investments and projected
returns
But could government experts really determine an accurate
value for such a prize that would incentivize continued research? Very unlikely.
Neither drug companies nor AIDS patients can afford a
slowdown in the market-driven innovation process that has characterized past
AIDS research. Market incentives have brought about 90 HIV/AIDS drugs to
patients in the past two decades, with more in development.
An artificial market managed by bureaucrats and
one-dimensional activists will retard this trend, if not end it.
Stopping the spread of AIDS is difficult. But the solution
is not to demonize those private companies trying to find cures or remove their
incentive to develop new treatments.
Rather, activists, politicians, and business leaders must
work together to address institutional problems — such as dysfunctional public
health systems and bad governance — that have made the AIDS crisis difficult to
combat.
Grace-Marie
Turner is president of the Galen Institute, a non-profit research organization
focusing on free-market solutions to health reform.