BIG PHARMA
SIMON BARBER: Sick state of US medicine monopolies
Aids, argued Thabo Mbeki, was a syndrome, not a disease treatable with antiretroviral drugs. The roots of his denialism will be endlessly debated, but of one there can be little doubt. He was deeply suspicious of Big Pharma. His enforcer, Essop Pahad, told me straight out that Aids was invented by the likes of Merck and GlaxoSmithKline. He and Mbeki were grotesquely wrong, of course, condemning hundreds of thousands to premature death. But they had good reason to question the bona fides of US and other Western drug companies. Recall that as the AIDS epidemic exploded, the companies and their lobbyists were fighting to stop SA and others in similar straits from exercising their World Trade Organisation-enshrined right to override patents on essential medicines. Mbeki was not about to cede SA’s sovereignty to what he saw as a new form of extractive colonialism. As he prepared to leave office in 1960, US president Dwight Eisenhower famously warned against state capture by what he calle...
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