Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2000. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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The Wall Street Journal - April 28, 2000
Gardiner Harris, Staff Reporter
The 10 activists from ACT UP were forced down a back staircase before they could enter the meeting room. Police said there were no immediate arrests. A larger crowd of activists stood outside the hotel, passing out fliers to shareholders.
Pfizer has agreed to donate Diflucan to South Africans with cryptococcal meningitis, an otherwise fatal brain infection that afflicts up to 8% of those with AIDS. But activists said many more of those with HIV infection throughout the world need the drug to fight off systemic fungal infections called candidiasis, or thrush. They want Pfizer either to lower dramatically the price of its own drug or allow generic manufacturers in developing countries to make it.
"We say, thank you for the donation, but we don't want to be begging. We want sustainable access to the drug," said Zackie Achmat, who came from Johannesburg, South Africa, to storm the Pfizer meeting. Mr. Achmat said he discovered he was infected with HIV in 1990, and he nearly died from a systemic fungal infection because he couldn't afford Diflucan. Friends finally collected enough money to buy him the medicine, which he says costs more than $12 a day in South Africa.
The price is about the same in the U.S.
A generic version of the drug made illegally in Thailand costs a tenth of Pfizer's branded version, Mr. Achmat said.
Asked about the protesters' demands, Pfizer Chairman William C. Steere Jr. said, "The pharmaceutical industry lives or dies on intellectual property rights," and he insisted Pfizer had no interest in allowing generic manufacturers to make the drug. But Mr. Steere said giving the drug away in some instances is proper, adding that "the kinds of philanthropy we do help us dramatically with regulators and legislators." (Mr. Steere is a director of Dow Jones & Co., which publishes The Wall Street Journal and WSJ.com.)
A Pfizer spokeswoman said the company met just last week with South Africa's minister of health to design a program to donate the drug.
Despite the protest, the business of the annual meeting continued, with shareholders voting overwhelmingly to approve the integration of Warner Lambert Co. into Pfizer and to increase Pfizer's board to absorb some Warner directors.
The New York company said the worldwide headquarters of its research operations would be located in buildings now under construction in New London, Conn. John Niblack, Pfizer's research chief, said the two companies will together have a databank of two million compounds. And he touted Warner-Lambert's Agouron labs in La Jolla, Calif., and its X-ray crystallography group.
"Spreading this sophisticated technical know-how across the expanded array of projects in our new global research and development organization is just one example of how our R&D merger will generate immediate operational benefits," Dr. Niblack said.
In response to a question about how many would lose jobs in the merger, Mr. Steere said "layoffs would be very moderate, if at all." Write to Gardiner Harris at gardiner.harris@wsj.com1
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