AIDS Authority

Media Matters
Dec 19 India is all the rage in the world of AIDS lately.
Dec 17 A Reuters report titled, "AIDS Spreading Among Wives in India," has nothing to do with an increase in AIDS among Indian wives.
Dec 17 Being a US senator is a good career move.
Articles
Dec 24 An Informed Public
Dec 22 Conspiracies and Big Business
Dec 19 Dismantling Dreams [part 2]
Dec 17 Biological Markers
Dec 15 AIDS For Profit
Other
Manifesto What this site is up to
Site News Recent notices of our slow but steady rebirth
Email for information, comments or feedback.
Dismantling Dreams
for December 19, 1997
AIDS activists are a wet dream for the pharmaceutical industry.
Thinking that they have finally reached positions of political power - where they play a critical role in determining national policy on a major issue - activists are basking in the political high-life. Vying for titles like "AIDS Czar," having the HIV-positive label is worth some political leverage. Kim Mills, of the Human Rights Campaign, said
"...by having an HIV-positive AIDS adviser, Mr. Clinton would show his commitment to fighting the disease."
AIDS activists are deluded if they think that they are responsible for changing public policy on HIV and AIDS.
AIDS has been a wet dream for the pharmaceutical industry. Lobbyists for the disease are serving the needs of the corporate underpinnings of the medical research and treatment complex far better than that complex could have hoped. Further, by appointing token homosexuals to moderately prominent positions the federal government gets the added perk of being "gay friendly" or "committed" or whatever, when in fact it is simply continuing to serve the corporate sector with the blessing of those it is supposed to be helping.
It takes about 7 years and $360 million to see a drug through from idea to product. The largest chunk of this money is taken up in the trials, which cost about $130 million (phase III trials alone cost about $90 million).
And AIDS activists want to dismantle the drug trial process. The drug industry is having a capitalistic orgasm over the increased profit margin as a result, and lawmakers are more than happy to scratch the back of the pharmaceutical PACs: politicians get more money for re-election, the drug industry saves hundreds of millions a year on testing costs (and they get a few other choice pieces of legislation [1] [ 2] pushed through to boot), and the White House gets to appoint a few homosexuals and HIV-positives to token positions (not too many homosexuals, though) and call it all a dedication to fighting AIDS.
Trashing the trial process, here and abroad, is certainly not against the wishes of the drug industry. Surely they would have lobbied for doing so themselves if the very concept weren't so completely outragous. But now that some activists want it done, hell, give them a few offices and we'll do it in their name.
The power that AIDS activists have over HIV/AIDS policy only extends as far as their willingness to pursue a corporate-friendly agenda, and no further. In fact, that agenda will be pursued beyond what AIDS activists wish, and they have only themselves to blame for allowing it in the first place.
Why wouldn't Burroughs-Wellcome (now Glaxo-Wellcome) be friendly to AIDS activists for their help in getting drugs to the market faster?
Why wouldn'tofficials from Bristol-Myers Squibb meet with AIDS activists to lobby their support for drug marketing?
Why wouldn't Glaxo-Wellcome meet with European activists and give in to their call to "make more [3TC] available to the expanded access scheme to ensure that no-one without other anti-retroviral options would lose out"?
Why wouldn't Glaxo-Wellcome welcome even a boycott by AIDS activists, since the purpose of it is to make a completely experimental drug marketable even prior to clinical trials? It is pharmaceutical heaven.
The result of such a boycott is to put pressure on the FDA to dismantle the trial process, which it did and continues to do. It is the door that the industry has been waiting for, and now that activists have opened it, they are not altogether happy about the beast they are letting in. But they have served their purpose, and they'll have a much harder time closing that door than they did opening it.
Continue to Part 2...