Drugs, Aid and Africa

I didn’t really have the urge to say any more about the Kevin Myers piece in the Irish Independent but it seems that Steve has made good his threat and become a regular reader and thus informs us that a group going by the name of the Immigrant Council of Ireland has lodged a formal complaint with Dublin Police and the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism insisting that he be charged under Ireland’s Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act 1989.

You can read his repost here. I don’t think his article was racist; strong-worded or antagonistic but not actually racist. He also reproduces an email that he was sent by staff at “Metro” magazine which includes a list of questions. The one the caught my eye was this :

“2. Do you agree that your article could be misunderstood in some quarters? If so then what is the main idea of it and what was it really trying to say?”

Which I would understand to be an admission that they don’t really think his article was racist either but rely on the classic smear that it had a hidden message, was subtly crafted with the intent of being misunderstood by “certain quarters” who would then rise-up in racist fervour as a result of the article. You see this insinuation quite a lot these days but what bothers me is that it relies on a racist premise to start with; that white people are inherently racist and all it would take is some rabble-rousing prose to trigger some hate-filled blood bath. Nonsense of course but these spurious quangos need to justify their existence somehow.

Activists Hail Senate Approval of Major Aids Bill
 
AIDS and global health activists are hailing Wednesday’s approval by the U.S. Senate of an unprecedented five-year, 48-billion-dollar bill to fight AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis overseas, particularly in Africa.

Sounds wonderful doesn’t it? Those nice Americans giving so much money to AIDS sufferers in Africa. Read that article more carefully however and there are a few details to consider. The bill was blocked by conservative senators complaining of the costs for some time, not surprisingly as America is currently steeped in debt to the point of affectively being bankrupt so any largess will be at a creditors expense. Remember as well that there isn’t free healthcare in the US and I’m sure there are plenty of poor Americans who can’t afford AIDS drugs either.

When AIDS first appeared there was fear of a global epidemic wiping out millions which lead to the major drug companies investing vast resources in full-scale research programmes looking for a cure however as education programmes in the developed world kicked-in people changed their behaviour and the spectre of the feared catastrophe subsided. With the exception of Africa. This left the drug companies with a problem as they had diminishing means of recouping their development and research costs and their main consumer base almost impoverished. Worse still lobbyists wanted them to reduce the costs of the expensive drugs for the developing world and some African states wanted to manufacture the drugs themselves at prices their people could afford whilst invigorating their own pharmaceutical industry.

Drugs firms drop Aids case
 
The 39 pharmaceutical companies contesting a South African law that could provide cheaper versions of branded Aids drugs have unconditionally dropped the case.

This left only one route for the drug companies and that was to lobby the government to buy the drugs at a higher price from them using tax-payers money and then dump them on the African market, undermining the market for the domestic drugs companies and extending the cycle of dependency. There are also some strange caveats.

Under the bill, for example, none of the funding can be provided to family planning clinics or groups that perform abortions or even lobby for relaxing anti-abortion laws in their home countries, or that decline to explicitly denounce “prostitution and human trafficking”.

It all sounds a bit familiar but I’ll leave you to make your mind up.