I hadn’t been to an AIDS demonstration so far this year (my bad) but the prerecorded announcement from the ACT-UP phone tree Wednesday night haunted my sleep and got me out of bed and headed for midtown Thursday morning. The demo here in NYC was part of an international week of actions (including Arizona, Thailand, France, Switzerland and more) targeting pharmaceutical giant Roche. The demand was simple: Roche must negotiate with the South Korean government to lower prices on bulk orders of lifesaving AIDS drug Fuzeon for its national healthcare system.
What got me going was hearing the quote from Urs Fluekiger, marketing director for Roche Korea, who explained the company’s refusal to budge on their $22,000 price tag for one patient/year of this vital medication:
We do not do business for saving lives but for making money. Saving lives is none of our business.
I thought to myself, okay, that tears it. It’s getting harder and harder to find anyone saying a kind word about good old freemarket capitalism, what with the mounting wreckage that is the global economy these days and the hurt that will be put on everyday working people here in the US and around the world in order to rescue the bloodsuckers who have benefited from this system.
There’s every reason we should make a point of kicking ’em while they’re down.
So I did my little bit yesterday, leafleting at a characteristically lively and imaginative action by ACT-UP’s New York and Philly locals and other AIDS groups. Scores of people grabbed fliers as they rushed to work in the skyscraper housing LifeBrands, Inc., the ad agency that Roche employs to promote Fuzeon.
There’s plenty more detail to deepen your rage at Roche–how they bought out the company that was given the rights to this drug by the governmen (which sponsored the original research), how their executives have shut down all AIDS and HIV research, how their profits last year exceeded 30%. But that one quote tells the story, about Roche and about the whole system they have made themselves such a success in.
We do not do business for saving lives but for making money. Saving lives is none of our business.
(photos: Kaytee Riek)
Crossposted from Fire on the Mountain, where there are other photos of the demo.
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free fall, but sometimes it’s the single telling detail that gets you going…
is complete.
We do not do business for saving lives but for making money. Saving lives is none of our business.
This is at the heart of the whole freakin mess. Capitalism ate itself. It stopped having any business other then ‘making money’, problem is that the money they make is not real all they make is debt. So why are we throwing more at them? Big Pharma is just another nasty scam, another extortion by those who long ago stopped having any ties to society other then the profit to be gleaned from the misery they inflict.
It’ll be interesting to see how Roche plans to sell pharmaceuticals to dead people.