As governments around the world struggle desperately to provide treatment and care to millions of poor and oppressed people infected with HIV—the virus that causes AIDS—giant pharmaceutical companies continue to reap obscene profits. They do this by controlling the prices of life preserving treatments such as anti-retroviral medications. The giant pharmaceuticals garner more than $100 million in profits daily from drug sales.
Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation—one of the primary groups spearheading the global effort to contain the wildfire AIDS epidemic—recently said, “Of the forty million people worldwide living with HIV/AIDS today, barely two million have access to these lifesaving drugs, and most of those live in the U.S. and Western Europe.”
This means that only 5 percent of people worldwide who are HIV positive have access to life-sustaining treatments.
For example, in India, only 30,000 of 5 million people infected with HIV have access to the life-saving medications.
In the United States—the world’s richest nation where hundreds of billions of dollars are spent each year on war and destruction in the Middle East—the HIV rate of infection is rising. This is especially true in oppressed communities, Black and Latino populations in particular.
In California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently vetoed a bill that would have provided access to condoms for inmates, a proven means of preventing the spread of HIV.
The U.S. Congress has yet to give final authorization this year for Ryan White funds for AIDS treatment and care. Yet, Congress routinely approves billion dollar spending bills to fund the U.S. colonial occupation of Iraq.
Government catering to the needs of the pharmaceutical companies over the needs of the people dramatizes what is so intrinsically wrong with healthcare based on profits.
World AIDS Day each year provides yet another opportunity for people around the world to reflect on what is needed to end the suffering of millions of people, including millions of children. A centralized, globally coordinated program aimed at providing the available treatments, education and care to all who are infected is urgently required to stop the epidemic. Also necessary is massive funding to find a decisive vaccine and cure.
This would require giant pharmaceutical companies to relinquish their control of the medications and to manufacture and distribute them to all who are infected or living with HIV/AIDS.
