Hi Gaj,
well said

.
I would have couple of points to add:
When thinking to eradicate a disease, the main drivers that I know are: awareness, prevention, diagnosis and treatment (this one being by far the key to solve the problem).
I do agree with the fact that people need to become aware of HCV, to know about prevention means and how to get diagnosed. So the advocacy groups are quite welcomed to do their part here

and I am happy that they exist.
However, when talking about the treatment, this is the point that makes the difference and reveals the true intentions: acting for making profit or for eradicating the disease. And this is also the point that reveals the nature of the advocacy groups: puppets of Big Pharma or true fighters of HCV. Up to the point of treatment, distinguishing between them is not so easy, but when discussing about the treatment options, things become much clear.
When an advocacy group (like the one that is very active today in Romania) starts complaining about how hard it is to negotiate with the government (well, I do believe it is) and is illustrating that people proceed with desperate measures by buying (generic) drugs over the internet, drugs which they claim are very often fake in order to increase the pressure on the government to allocate more money, but at the same time DOES NOT USE the opportunity to push forward the idea that CHEAP & EFFECTIVE GENERICS MAY TREAT PEOPLE IN MASS, this tells me that such an advocacy group is a Big Pharma puppet.
In principle, the main goal of an advocacy group must be to ensure that more and more people can get treated, thus it should not waste the opportunity provided by the generics, rather it should seek how people could access the "real generics" knowing that on the market there are scams and fake drugs.
At this stage I can say that I am really thankful to Greg for his blogs and to Fixhepc for providing this space for sharing information as it enabled me to have trust that generics will work and guided me on how to source my medication.
Cheers,
RHF