Activists Protest Against Obama's PEPFAR Budget Cuts

via Plus News

Almost a thousand Swazi and South African HIV activists marched to the United States consulate in Johannesburg on 22 March 2012 to demand that the US continue supporting the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis (TB) and Malaria, and safeguard funding of its President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which US President Barack Obama's latest proposed budget will cut by 12 percent.

The march organizers - a coalition of international and regional HIV organizations, including the global medical charity, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the World AIDS Campaign, and the AIDS Rights Alliance Southern Africa - also called on the British and Australian governments to join their American counterparts in kick-starting a response to solve the Global Fund's financial crisis.

Without an emergency donor meeting, the Fund - already in need of at least US$ 2 billion - will only secure additional funding at its next scheduled replenishment in 2014.

"We're not asking for charity, we are asking for social justice," said Daygan Eagar, a researcher at the South African human rights organization, Section27. "The US spends more money in one day of war than we're asking for the Global Fund."

Representatives from MSF, Section27 and the South African AIDS lobby group, Treatment Action Campaign, were to meet with consular and PEPFAR representatives to discuss their concerns.
The demonstration was also endorsed by the two million-member Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). It followed similar protest action at US representative offices in Swaziland, according to Siphiwe Hlophe, a founder of the NGO, Swaziland for Positive Living (SWAPOL).

"If we are here, if we are laughing, it is because we are on drugs," she told the crowd. "Before the Global Fund we didn't have food, we didn't have pyschosocial support, we didn't disclose our HIV status - that all started when the Global Fund came. Look at how many of us are here today - that is the Global Fund."

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ARV Access Fears Across the World

A slew of recent articles have appeared in the news lately which express concern over the availability and accessability of many countries including Swaziland (PlusNews), Indonesia (Jakarta Globe), and middle-income countries around the world (below). This comes on the heels of the Ranbaxy-Gilead deal which has the potential to greatly increase the supply of these life-saving drugs.

Bad News for Drug Prices in Middle-Income Countries

Middle-income countries with large numbers of people living with HIV will no longer benefit from preferential pricing when buying antiretroviral drugs from large pharmaceutical companies, according to the annual Médecins Sans Frontières drug pricing report, Untangling the Web of ARV Price Reductions.

“The main bad news in the study is the fact that a number of pharmaceutical companies will no longer be providing preferential pricing to middle-income countries like Brazil, China, India and Thailand,” Nathan Ford, medical director at MSF’s Campaign for Access to Affordable Medicines, said at the launch of the report at the 6th International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention in Rome.

According to the report, pharmaceutical firm ViiV Healthcare – owned by Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline – no longer offers reduced prices to middle-income countries, even when their programmes are fully funded by the Global Fund to fight HIV, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Merck has also ceased to offer discounted prices to all lower middle- and upper middle-income countries, proposing instead to negotiate discounts on a case-by-case basis. Previously, Merck offered middle-income countries discounts that were still up to 10 times the price of generic versions. Of particular concern is the price of UN World Health Organization-recommended third-line drug, raltegravir – an integrase inhibitor that blocks retroviral replication – which costs up to US$5,870 per person per year in Brazil, compared with $675 in sub-Saharan Africa.

Janice Lee, pharmacist at MSF’s Campaign for Access to Essential Medicine, noted that drug company discount programmes were not a long-term solution, and governments would have to start using trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS) measures to override patents; in the past, Brazil and Thailand have used compulsory licences – when a government allows someone else to produce the patented product or process without the consent of the patent owner – to lower prices in their countries.

The report notes that Abbott excludes low- and middle-income countries from differential prices for the standalone heat-stable ritonavir 100mg tablet. It blocks the enzyme protease, required by HIV to make new viruses. A spokesman for Abbott said the company’s long-standing pricing policy would protect the poorest people living with HIV.

"Abbott’s preferential pricing policy for ritonavir has been in place, unchanged, for a decade,” Dirk van Eeden, director of HIV communication and policy at Abbott, told IRIN/PlusNews via email. “It includes all African and least developed countries, where the outright majority of patients with HIV live.”

ViiV Healthcare also defended its pricing policy, saying it was committed to ensuring access to its medicines.

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Content that is linked from other sources is for informational purposes and should not construe a Mapping Pathways position.]