The Washington Blade - March 9, 2001
Inga Sorensen

The demonstration was timed to coincide with the start of a trial thousands of miles away that pits a collection of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies against the South African government's efforts to obtain AIDS medications for its often poor and ailing citizens.

On trial is a lawsuit brought by the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers' Association of South Africa, a trade group comprising 39 drug firms, seeking to strike down South Africa's Medicines and Related Substances Control Act. The law, passed in 1997, allows the country to import much-needed AIDS drugs at relatively low costs. But it has yet to be implemented, blocked instead by PMA legal action.

In its lawsuit, PMA argues that the law violates international trade agreements and infringes on intellectual property rights. But AIDS activists say that if the law is implemented, the South African government will be able to dramatically increase access to affordable medications. The government could, for example, import equivalent generic drugs from India or Brazil. Those countries produce generics, which the drug companies have strongly opposed.

In a Wall Street Journal article Wednesday, openly Gay Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mark Schoofs reported that some pharmaceutical companies, like Merck, are trying to settle the dispute with African countries by offering much-reduced prices for medications there than they charge for the same medications in the United States. For instance, noted Schoofs and colleagues, Merck is offering the protease inhibitor indinavir, marketed as Crixivan for about $600 per year in Africa. The same drug costs patients in the United States about $6,000 per year.

In another article, the Wall Street Journal reported that on the second day of the trial this week, the presiding judge postponed further proceedings for six weeks. Oral arguments in the PMA case began March 5 in the South African High Court in Pretoria. The delay came after the judge agreed that a local AIDS activist group in Pretoria should be allowed to participate with the South African government as defendants in the lawsuit. Attorneys for the PMA asked for a four-month delay to prepare for the additional defendant, but the court said the proceedings would resume April 18.

Roughly 4.2 million South Africans - about a 10th of its population - are infected with HIV. It is estimated that more than 25 million of the 36 million people infected with HIV live in sub-Saharan Africa, where many people have no access to or ability to pay for the thousands of dollars it costs per year for AIDS medications.

International patent law stipulates that pharmaceutical companies receive a two-decade monopoly to produce and sell drugs they develop. Activists contend that drug companies are more concerned with making profits by protecting their billion-dollar patent rights than they are about saving lives. And, they say, people in the most AIDS-ravaged countries such as South Africa often can"t afford the high-priced drugs, which can cost thousands of dollars annually per patient - exponentially more than many South Africans earn in a year.

Mirryena Deeb, PMA's chief executive, told Reuters, "What has been absent and what holds back treatment to South Africans living with HIV is a lack of political commitment."

On Monday, with the start of the trial, thousands demonstrated outside the South African High Court and the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria. Solidarity demonstrations were staged throughout the globe, including in New York. A protest scheduled in Washington, D.C., was postponed for a week because organizers from Philadelphia opted not to travel to the nation's capital due to the winter storm advisory.

From Botswana to the Bronx, from Burundi to Bed-Stuy, AIDS is not over, shouted Amanda Lugg, housing co-coordinator for the Harlem-based African Services Committee, which was founded in 1981 by a group of African refugees to provide resettlement assistance to new African arrivals in the New York metropolitan area. The group in part provides HIV-related services.

"People are dying in catastrophic numbers," Lugg told the crowd huddled together at New York"s 59th Street and Fifth Avenue near Central Park. Freezing rain soaked the undaunted protesters, some of whom had driven down on slick roads from upstate.

Protesters held placards reading "Drug company greed kills," and "Generic AIDS drugs save lives." Several pockets of New York Police Department officers hovered close by.

According to ACT UP/New York, an AIDS activist group that helped orchestrate the Manhattan protest, since PMA's lawsuit was filed, an estimated 400,000 South Africans have died of AIDS.

A long line of New York Police Department escorts walked near AIDS protesters as they made their way from 59th Street and Fifth Avenue to GlaxoSmithKline on Park Ave at 59th Street, and then down to Bristol-Myers Squibb on Park Avenue at 51st Street. Glaxo, according to the Wall Street Journal, sells its nucleoside analog 3TC for $3,271 per patient per year in the United States and $232 in Africa.

Bristol-Myers, it says, sells its nucleoside d4t for $3,589 in the United States and $252 in Africa. The paper, and reports on National Public Radio Wednesday, noted that the pharmaceuticals are concerned that selling their medications for much lower prices in Africa will trigger protests demanding lower prices in the United States as well.

Both companies are headquartered in New York City, and both are plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

Activists referred to GSK as "GlobalSerialKillers" and BMS as "Big Murder Syndicate" in chants demanding the companies drop the lawsuit against the South African government.

Outraged by what it says is GlaxoSmithKline's "history of thwarting access to affordable generic AIDS drugs in Africa," activists from ACT UP/New York took over the company's investor relations offices on Feb. 20, where they threw "blood money" and empty pill bottles, and chanted "GlaxoSmithKline! GlobalSerialKiller!" ACT UP New York and other activists are demanding that PMA drop its lawsuit and stop blocking efforts to generic AIDS drugs in cases when branded drugs aren't available or priced out of reach of people with AIDS.

They also called on the Bush administration to "immediately issue a strong statement condemning the drug company lawsuit against South Africa." At Monday"s protest, Paul Usungu, who came from Rwanda and is now a client of the African Services Committee, told the drenched, cold crowd: "Villages are disappearing. ... Why can"t we help these people?"

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