Drug Profits from Diease- Which ones?

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Arnoldgore

 

The article below, wile a good overview of the role of patented pofitable drugs, falls into the trap of thinking that "cheap drugs" are a benrfit worth having---step very GINGERLY here. Most drugs--and ALL AIDS drugs in particular which this article refers to have very severe long term CONSEQUENCES. They comprimise your immune system further and effect vital organs and DNA needed to rally the imune system. Always look for natural substitutes and how you are going to limit and hopefully ELIMINATE dependence on these drugs.arnold

Sent from the Internet (Details) List, It is articles like the one below that make it implicitly clear thatcancer patients must fight to get good information on inexpensive, natural,and effective treatments for cancer. These must be treatments which aresimple and straightforward enough that no government or corporate powerhousecan stand between you and your health.Vincent__________Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg)April 24, 2003When disease becomes profitableIt is the biggest and most powerful drug company on the planet. Its famousblue diamond-shaped Viagra pills have made it a fortune beyond the dreams ofsmall nation states and the butt of smutty jokes worldwide. But Pfizer'sglobal reach has not turned the world's third largest business into abenevolent giant, according to its critics.Quite the contrary. The vast multinational stands accused of blockingreforms to global drug pricing that would help lift impoverished countriesout of disease and spur their development.As shareholders gather for the annual general meeting in Michigan thismorning, their investments snugly coining profits at the rate of $1-millionan hour, critics are asking increasingly urgent questions about Pfizer'sattitude to those who need medicines in poor countries.The takeover last week of Pfizer with Pharmacia, which took the NewYork-based giant past its British rival GlaxoSmithKline to become thelargest company of the most profitable industry on the planet, makes it allthe more important, they say, that Pfizer takes a lead in conceding a systemof low prices in the 90% of the world worst hit by disease.The battle for low prices for the poor pits the basic instinct of hugeAmerican corporations to make money against a growing public belief thatpharmaceutical companies have a special humanitarian duty to help the sick,wherever they are in the world and however little they can afford to pay.Already the major drug companies have slashed the prices of Aids drugs,albeit as a result of a public outcry combined with competition from genericcompanies making cheap copies of their drugs in countries that do not yetacknowledge their patents.But now the stakes have risen higher still. The drug companies haverecognised that they must be seen to help in the Aids crisis, but Pfizer andthe rest want to draw a line in the sand, separating Aids, malaria andtuberculosis and similar infectious pandemics from the insidious andprofitable diseases that affect millions in rich countries as well as poor,such as cancer. Cheap Aids drugs - yes. Cheap cancer drugs? Well, saysPfizer, poor countries haven't asked for them. They've got far too manyother problems."I've got to tell you, I don't know very many health ministers in very manypoor countries that are approaching pharmaceutical companies, generic ornon-generic, asking for cancer drugs," says Robert Mallett, Pfizer'scombative vice-president for corporate affairs.But Rafael Bengoa, director of management of non-communicable disease at theWorld Health Organisation, says they had better look out. The struggle overAids drugs will inevitably become a struggle over insulin and cancer drugstoo. While Aids and Sars hit headlines, he warns, "the invisible epidemicsare killing more people than those".Pfizer says talk of cancer drugs is irrelevant. This is a massive but inmany ways old-style American corporation, making megabuck profits that to USeyes look more impressive the higher they climb. For over 150 years, sinceyoung Charles Pfizer left Germany with $2 500 borrowed from his father andset up in Brooklyn with his cousin Charles Erhart, the company has prideditself on its entrepreneurial spirit and the quality of its products.Their first big hit was santonin, a bitter and unpopular medicine used totreat intestinal worms. The pair, inspired by Erhart's confectionerybackground, mixed it with almond-toffee flavouring, moulded it into a coneshape, and never looked back.A smart line in painkillers, preservatives and disinfectants during thecivil war confirmed Pfizer as a runaway success story. In 1955, it beganselling antibiotics in the UK. By 1972 it had crossed the billion-dollarsales threshold. By 1980, it had its first billion-dollar single drug -- theanti-inflammatory medicine piroxicam, brand-name Feldene.It's a classic American success story. Pfizer has made its own luck, calledall the shots and has now reached the top of the pinnacle. But the pressureis on to introduce the kind of tiered pricing system -- different rates fordifferent states -- that runs counter to its philosophy.Campaigners who took to the streets and lambasted the drug giants over theappalling spectacle of young men, women and children in Africa dying ofAids, which is treatable although not curable in rich countries, have nowwidened the grounds for complaint. They want a transparent system which willallow poor countries to waive the multinational giants' patents and buy ormake whatever cheap drugs they need to safeguard the health of their people.That means cancer, asthma, diabetes as well as Aids, TB and malaria.In Geneva, negotiations that were supposed to endorse the right of poorcountries to obtain cheap medicines when they need them have ploughed into aquagmire. Developing countries want the so-called Doha declaration of theWorld Trade Organisation talks to specify that they can have drugs for anyillness. Just before the end of the year the US, whose interests appearindistinguishable from those of the pharmaceutical industry, blocked a deal.Pfizer was one of the companies lobbying energetically against concessionsover Doha. "Well I think we are comfortable with the position that the USgovernment has taken as a whole," says Mallett, who used to work in theoffice of the US Trade Representative -- the government department in chargeof the negotiations.In fact, Pfizer is happy to have no deal at all. Existing trade agreementsgive the very poorest countries the option to waive patents if they need to,he insists. But Paul Zeitz, of the Global Aids Alliance, says they are notenough. "Developing countries are highly intimidated by the US Governmentand Pharma and the Doha Declaration provides them some protection," he says.The issue could scupper the trade round, fire the anger of developingcountries and protesters and turn the WTO meeting in Cancun in Septemberinto another Seattle.Pfizer knows how to flex its lobbying muscles. Three years ago it was amongpharmaceutical companies who targeted a statutory committee of theAustralian government responsible for recommending whether medicines shouldbe paid for by the state, and at what price. (Drug prices in Australia wereamong the lowest in OECD countries.) Critics claim industry pressure led tothe dissolution of the pharmaceutical benefits advisory committee and there-appointment of some but not all members, together with an industryrepresentative.Pfizer also sued two members of the committee over their refusal torecommend Viagra, the impotence pill, to the government for state subsidy,but lost their court action.Pfizer rejects any suggestion that it is not doing its bit for the pooralthough it won't participate in tiered pricing schemes administered byoutside independent bodies, as recommended by Clare Short's Department forInternational Development working group last year."The notion that some body out of Europe or the US should come up and startdictating what prices ought to be somewhere else strikes us as a ratherradical notion," says Mallett. "We do pricing by markets."In Aids-hit Africa, in response to international pressure, Pfizer donatesits drug fluconazole (brand name Diflucan) to nations where it isdesperately needed to treat cryptococcal meningitis and oral thrush, whichcommonly infect and can kill those with weakened immune systems.But donations are not good enough, says the Nobel Peace prize-winningorganisation of volunteer doctors, Medecins sans Frontieres. "We're talkingabout systematic long-term medicines provision for about 90% of the world'spopulation," says Ellen t'Hoen of MSF. "You can't possibly deal with that ona donations basis. It is not realistic. The solutions need to be found inthe trade area.""Whatever companies like Pfizer say in their glossy annual reports, thereally big issue is how to make medicines affordable for poor people," saysSophia Tickell, Oxfam policy adviser."This is not a question of philanthropy and donations; it is about givingthe 40 million people who die every year from preventable diseases access tomedicines. It is scandalous that the likes of Pfizer refuses to budge onchanging the rules of trade so that life -- saving drugs are available tothe poor, not just the rich.""Drug donations programmes are definitely not the right answer," says PaulZeitz of the US-based Global Aids Alliance. "They (the drug companies) havebeen extremely slow to offer them, they implement cumbersome enrolment andeligibility criteria, they protect the patent system, and they allow thecompany tax write-offs and good public relations, but they do not solve theproblem."In fact there have been major problems with the implementation of Pfizer'sflagship fluconazole donations programme. On paper, the Diflucan Partnershiplooked the very model of responsible and generous corporate giving. Theworld's largest drugs company would offer Diflucan, which can be alife-saver for HIV/Aids patients, at no charge in 50 of the world's poorestcountries and fund medical training to go with the donations.There would be "no dollar or time limits", said Hank McKinnell, Pfizer'schief executive, and the director general of the World Health Organisationhailed it as evidence that "the private sector is showing it is willing todo its part to fight the HIV/Aids epidemic".The reality on the ground was very different, according to some of thosetrying to distribute the free supplies of Diflucan. A year after the launchof the Diflucan Partnership, Pfizer effectively admitted that supplies werenot reaching the intended recipients in great enough numbers.Instead of running the scheme in-house, it sub-contracted administration toAxios International, a Paris-based company which performs a similar rolewith other pharmaceutical company's donation programmes. Even now, however,the intended target of 50 countries is not even close -- free supplies havereached just 15, in some cases in very small quantities.Joseph Saba, chief executive of Axios, says: "What Pfizer was trying to dowas go country by country, but with 50 countries it was taking a long timeso they came to us to open it up. I hope that if you ask us in six months'time, it will not be 15 countries, but 20-25. Setting up the programme tooka long time. It's important to acknowledge that. But it was not becausePfizer was dragging its feet - it's because they were figuring out the bestway to do it."Even so, the fluconazole donation programme is not a model that campaignerswant to see copied. Charity, at the whim of a multinational corporation,they say, is not a sustainable response to pandemics not only of Aids, TBand malaria, but increasingly also the diseases that are stealthily creepingacross the developing nations as the rich countries of the US and Europeexport the unhealthy diet and lifestyles of the affluent.Pfizer says it's only really about the expensive drugs needed for the Aidspandemic. "We cannot as an industry solve the healthcare problems of theentire poor world, nor should we be held accountable to do that. What weshould be held accountable to is to the extent we can to make our productsavailable on affordable terms to many of the poor countries," says Mallett.Shareholders may not agree. A recent report from investment houses in theCity of London sent a warning to the pharmaceutical companies that they mustpay more heed to the needs of the poor in developing countries if they arenot to damage their share values. At Pfizer's AGM today, there is everythingto play for.$10bn-a-year empire built on ViagraThere has never been a drug company quite like Pfizer. Last week itcompleted the $60bn takeover of its rival Pharmacia, allowing it to reclaimtop ranking among pharmaceutical companies with an 11% share of the worldmarket; it is now 50% bigger than its nearest challenger, GlaxoSmithKline.It has 120 000 employees and a stock market value of $180-billion, making itthe world's fifth-largest quoted company -- only Microsoft, GeneralElectric, Exxon Mobil and Wal-Mart are bigger .Last year, 10 of its drugs recorded individual sales of more than$1-billion - the industry definition of a blockbuster -- and the groupboasts that on any given day, 40 million people around the world are treatedwith a Pfizer medicine; the range runs from Viagra for impotence through toconsumer brands such as Nicorette, Listerine and Sudafed. The profits fromthis enterprise are astonishing: Wall Street analysts predict Pfizer willmake close to $10-billion this year -- about $27-million a day, includingweekends, or over $1-million an hour, every hour.Perhaps the most astonishing aspect is that a decade ago Pfizer was amongthe also-rans of the global drugs league. In 1990, it ranked only 14th andlooked more like prey than predator. Its big leap forward came with thediscovery of three blockbusters in the early 1990s -- Zoloft, anantidepressant, Zithromax, an antibiotic, and Norvasc for hypertension.By 1997, profits had doubled in five years to $2,2-billion and Pfizer thenhit the jackpot with Lipitor, a cholesterol-lowering drug.By 1999, Lipitor was the world's biggest-selling prescription drug, withsales that year of almost $4-billion, a figure that has since doubled. Afterthe biggest-selling drug came the most famous. Viagra, developed by Pfizer'sBritish laboratories in Kent and a marketing triumph in an area of medicinethat most pharmaceutical companies had written off as too seedy or tooobscure.The critics complained that Pfizer's sales force -- with a reputation foremploying former militarypersonnel -- had turned the business of sellingprescription pharmaceuticals into something akin to selling soap powder, butWall Street loved it. The brash New York company was clearly a winner.Then came last year's bid for Pharmacia, which initially gave Wall Streetthe jitters and sent Pfizer's shares to their lowest level for four years.Nine months of sweet-talking by chief executive Hank McKinnell, however,seems to have done the trick.This time he is promising cost savings of $2,5-billion over the next threeyears as surplus jobs are shed, although the sceptics argue that the companyis now just too big for its own good.To keep earnings growing at 10%-plus a year, it needs a steady supply of newblockbusters. Its big sellers, such as Lipitor, Zithromax and Zoloft, arenow ageing, and the group's labs have not produced a blockbuster sinceViagra, even though Pfizer is already the industry's top spender on originalresearch.Until it can rediscover its scientific touch, it is open to the charge thatit is just a highly skilled practitioner of the corporate arts of sellingproducts and buying rivals. - Guardian Unlimited © Guardian NewspapersLimited 2003