Gilead’s phase 3 trials involved a lot of human experimentation. ION worked out well, but some of the people who helped trial telaprevir boceprevir were not so lucky. There is no evident sense of any need to pay back into the society and people that made these profits possible.

On current trends by the time the patents on DAAs expire as many as 20 million people will have perished who could have been saved. That’s more or less equivalent to the entire population of my country.

The US has used military force and economic sanctions against countries judged in contravention of basic human rights, and yet here we have it’s own citizens dying and it stands impotent to do anything about the actions of a corporate entity trading within its sovereign borders.

At the conclusion of WWII a number of people, judged guilty of genocide on a mass scale, were taken out, tied to a post, and shot.

Times have changed but we, as in society, need to have a serious conversation around pharma profits, patent rights and patient rights.

The standard of living we all enjoy depends on co-operative effort and anybody wanting more than their fair share of the communal pie is strangling the goose that lays the golden eggs.

FixHepC is a peaceful protest about this.