Call for tougher stance over ‘immoral’ drug prices

Date: 05/07/01

By David Cronin

LEFT-LEANING MEPs are demanding that a parliamentary report on AIDS and other major diseases affecting developing countries is redrafted so that it criticises drug companies for keeping the prices of essential medicines prohibitively high.

More than 150 amendments have been tabled to the report by British Conservative Bashir Khanbhai on the EU's five-year action programme on combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, which is due to be adopted by the European Parliament's development committee next week.

Welsh Socialist Glenys Kinnock said the paper should be substantially altered to make it clear that the global patent regime can be altered so that medicines can be bought more cheaply. "That message needs to be clearly sent to the pharmaceutical industry," she added.

But Khanbhai, who ran a drugs firm in Tanzania before entering politics, argued that it would be impossible to make the pharmaceutical industry lower prices. "That would require legislation which would never be passed in the EU," he said. "We do not compel our oil industry to sell oil at a certain price."

Oxfam lobbyist David Earnshaw said that TRIPS, the international agreement on intellectual property, needs reworking because the drug firms can set unaffordable prices. "It is possible for them to grant life or death," said

Earnshaw, who until recently was the Brussels lobbyist for SmithKline Beecham. He added: "It is an immoral and disgraceful situation."

Left-leaning MEPs are demanding that a parliamentary report on AIDS and other major diseases affecting developing countries is redrafted so that it criticises drug companies for keeping the prices of essential medicines prohibitively high.