Brazil, Others, Battle For Public Health Rights Over Pharmaceutical Cartel

May 21, 2009 (LPAC)--Developing nations continued to brawl with representatives of the pharmaceutical cartel at the World Health Organization annual meeting ongoing in Geneva, to secure the principle that public health takes precedence over private commercial interests. At issue, is whether nations or the cartels will control access to the information, technology, medications and vaccines required to defeat the new influenza pandemic, and any that follow.

The battle to defend that principle, and secure adequate supplies of vaccines and anti-virals, and the logistics to deliver them, forces the underlying agenda onto the table: human life will only be secured by replacing globalization with a new, nation-centered international credit system.

In a pre-meeting over the weekend, the Obama administration's Special Representative for Avian and Pandemic Influenza, Amb. Robert Loftis, led a fight, with the European Union, to limit, if not eliminate altogether the legally-binding document called the Standard Material Transfer Agreement (SMTA), which regulates exchange of materials related to viruses and vaccines. Developing sector nations hit the roof, because, under globalization, the SMTA is one of their few protections against the pharmaceutical cartel taking the virus samples they send them, and then developing patented vaccines which they only sell back to poor countries at exorbitant prices.

When no agreement could be reached, the U.S., EU, Japan, and others suggested that everyone simply agree to implement the points already agreed on, leaving the remaining, key issues to be worked out in "smaller, potentially informal meetings."

Brazil, in coordination with Indonesia and India, lined up all the African and South American countries to reject that maneuver as an attempt to impose "agreements reached behind closed doors by small groups." Brazil is insisting that nations, operating through the World Health Organization, must run global negotiations on securing transfer of technology, and access to medicines and the inputs for vaccines and diagnostics on an affordable basis, whenever they are developed, by whomever they are developed.