On the 10th November 2017, FXU Global Justice Now society, in collaboration with Youth Stop Aids, hosted a talk at Woodlane Campus with guest speakers Sibongile Tshabalala and Ed Lewis. Sibongile had travelled all the way from South Africa where she is the national chairperson for the Treatment Action Campaign (or TAC), an organization advocating equal accessibility to comprehensive, high quality healthcare and treatment for all persons living with HIV. The organization enacts advocacy, litigation, lobbying and all forms of social mobilisation techniques in order to overcome discriminatory factors which may be limiting individual access to these essential treatments. The organization also specifically targets patenting laws which lead to the inaccessibility of crucial treatments and countless unnecessary deaths. Sibongile, in a recent article in The Citizen, addressed this issue and its continuing prevalence today: ‘We have lost comrades due to high medicine prices driven by unwarranted patent monopolies.’ Ed Lewis, who spoke alongside Sibongile, is a national organizer at Global Justice Now, a ‘democratic social justice organisation working as part of a global movement to challenge the powerful and create a more just and equal world.’
Sibongile’s talk was nothing short of extraordinary: she is a woman who, on finding out her HIV status, decided to, in her own words, ‘fight’. This fight, however, has reached far past the boundaries of her own body and its struggle with the virus. Since becoming aware of her disease, Sibongile has taken part in countless pickets, protests, marches, talks and more, joining TAC in taking the South African governments and pharmaceutical giants to court in order to improve the accessibility to antiretrovirals (ARVs). She has also been part of their provision of education, and dissemination of accurate research on the realities of HIV, opportunistic infections and stigma surrounding the virus.
The talk outlined Sibongile’s timeline of actions with TAC, beginning with their confrontation of the government to ensure the availability of ‘mother to child transmission (MTCT)’ prevention, which took place in 2002-2003. The campaign involved a march and picket, resulting in the arrests of many protesters, which in turn drew media attention to the cause. Although this case was won, Sibongile asserted that due to then-president Thabo Mbeki’s denialist position, along with stigma surrounding the HIV virus, this was not fully implemented. In 2006, TAC experienced a congressional victory, following their civil disobedience campaign, which made antiretroviral access an official government policy. Although this was undeniably a milestone, Sibongile highlighted that the distribution of treatment was still inconsistent, and people were still dying of opportunistic infections. Sibongile explained that the TAC understands that hundreds of thousands of South African citizens died prematurely of AIDS during President Mbeki’s time in office: deaths which could have been prevented if the anti-HIV drugs had been efficiently disseminated. This figure is backed up by a study at Harvard University, which proved that, at a minimum, ‘330,000 people died unnecessarily in South Africa over the period and that 35,000 HIV-infected babies were born who could have been protected.’
Sibongile identified this as physical evidence of a need for better education. TAC also observed that clinics were, and still are in many cases, not implementing these newly-formed accessibility policies. Moreover, some women, due to the socially inscribed shame associated with the infection, were not taking their MTCTs during childbirth, thus putting their newborns in danger of infection. When combined with the power held by pharmaceutical monopolies and their overpricing of medication, it becomes clear that the terrain of social healthcare in South Africa is rocky. Sibongile’s speech highlighted not just complications in accessibility, fuelled by governmental disregard and pharmaceutical patenting problems, but the social and educational reality which underlines the fight against HIV.
Despite the entrenched denial, monetary barriers and social stigma, however, TAC is still fighting. The close of Sibongile’s speech marked an acknowledgement of a new milestone: just last month, Sibongile said, the South African government launched the first draft of a patent policy ‘re-evaluation’.
Ed Lewis’s erudite exposé on the reality of ‘big pharma’ today made it glaringly clear that the public healthcare landscape is not as smooth as we may be lead to believe, and the issues raised by Sibongile in her testimony are not as far away from home as we expect. His talk revealed the astonishing corporate power held by big-scale pharma in the global south, a power strengthened by ‘evergreening’ and patenting justification.
Using UK-based drug discoveries in relation to MS and Hepatitis C as a case study, Lewis traced the process of what happens to many drugs as they move from research to development, to the public domain. He explained, to the surprise of the audience, that research for both of these drugs was founded on public-sector money, yet purchased and patented by external companies. These patents, justified flimsily on claims of necessity (to recoup research costs and incentivize research developments), then make it impossible for the healthcare services to provide these medications for the full amount of patients who desperately need it. The 20-year lifespan of patents prolongs this issue meaning that limitations are put on treatments for two decades, a time span which leads to devastating human impact. Ed’s case studies proved this justification of patenting redundant, a notion which he stressed is the central observation of Global Justice Now’s ‘Pills and Profits’ report.
The conclusion of Ed’s talk was a call, much like with Sibongile and the TAC, for a ‘re-evaluation’ of the patenting system. Again, as with TAC’s efforts, steps are being made towards such a re-evaluation. For example, Ed noted that a recent United Nations report called for alternative research and development of drugs, separate from large-scale pharma – a step in the right direction. Ed then proceeded to suggest that perhaps restrictions should be put on drugs which are funded by public money, in order to make them more accessible to the public.
If we are to take anything from this event, it is that there is a need for better education, at all levels, on the realities of illnesses, medication and the healthcare system as a whole. As evidenced in the ‘Pills and Profits’ report, the current system allows for drug companies to ‘make a killing out of public research’, both literally and figuratively. In the words of the FXU Global Justice Now Society, taken from their promotional info on the event, ‘it’s time to put people before profit in the global drug industry.’