Enkel,

I am not sure it is because the doctors don’t rate the companies involved. After all, the UK NHS uses generics from these companies for about 40% of their scripts I believe. They wouldn’t do that if they thought the companies were rubbish.

So go figure.

dt

“There is coming a tipping point when the Civil Unrest caused by the rationing and deprivation of these life-enhancing medical developments will become such that the whole house will be brought down and the trough with it. That event will be good for nobody.”

I need to contradict myself on what I previously wrote above. On thinking about it, that was a naive statment. Of course it would suit the purposes of some factions to have runaway Civil Unrest. Duh! Especially if Martial Law were to be declared, thus removing the last civil rights of the citizens. Therefore it is more essential than ever for the citizens, the ordinary members of the public, to get the situation defused before it comes to that. We urgently need to get the checks and balances identified and into place. There is a lot more at stake than just the immediate situation with Gilead.

dt

I have been wondering about this myself. Over the years I have imported various things, mostly vitamins from the USA, and I’ve noticed that sometimes I would get a VAT bill and sometimes not, for the very same goods. On that basis I surmise that UK Customs stop random packages and examine them for VAT eligibility. Of course the higher the declared cost of the goods, the more likely to be stopped. Those Customs guys still need to get their salaries paid. Therefore I’d say that anybody importing meds needs to budget for UK VAT, although they might get lucky on it.

dt

klhilde:
“These numbers really aren’t very big and bear no relationship to Gilead’s price tags. Again, Pharmasset’s profits aren’t remotely the problem.”

What’s missing from this analysis is the question of whether Pharmasset should bear any responsibility for the future use of sofosbuvir, when they must have had a good idea about how Gilead would use it?

The doc
“Everyone who took a risk has been paid back in spades and now it’s time to provision the world with this cure”

The question is – how?
When Pharmasset owned sofosbuvir, they had the capability to ensure the happy situation described above by the doc. Instead they sold out to Gilead. For the sake of argument let’s say that you don’t think that Pharmasset should own any of the responsibility for the future use of sofosbuvir. Then who is going to oversee the provisioning of the world with this cure? Price competition would help but would it be enough? Right now we have the biotech revolution underway and ever accelerating. Seems to me that the world is missing a vital mechanism to ensure that the fruits coming out if it will be distributed to more than the few elite who can afford them. Unless this question is seriously addressed, Gilead is just the beginning.

dt

Thanks Mike,

What I’ve been trying to say all along is that if blame is going to be apportioned then it needs to land at more doors than just Gilead’s. One of those doors would be the democratic institutions, aka the government. If the government chooses not to carry out its duty to protect the vulnerable from the strong, if it chooses not to seriously do its duty in tackling the public health epidemic of hepC, then it is not fit for purpose. I think that needs to be said out loud. What is the point of having a democracy at all which demonstrably is not doing these things.

I wonder how much was spent on sending aid to Africa to tackle the ebola epidemic? I’m not saying that that shouldn’t have been done, but why couldn’t it also be done for their own citizens? Treatment tents set up on every corner. Sleeves rolled up. All hands to the pumps. Not glamorous though, is it? I think you nailed it. What gets/loses the most votes?

dt

dt

OK, I’m not finished with this subject, because a recital of “Gilead is Evil” does not satisfy me, not nearly.

There have been monumental disasters in history before. In the aftermath, the questions about who is to blame and who should be punished for it, have always come up.

Take the 2008 financial crash for one example. I have watched documentary after documentary about this. While it is fairly clear what happened and why it happened, for some reason it is not at all transparent who is to be held responsible. I have heard testimony by some of the major players, none of whom considered themselves to have done anything wrong. So far, history seems to agree with them. To date, hardly anybody has been prosecuted, let alone convicted, for perpetrating this disaster which brought the economy of the world to its knees and caused untold suffering to many.

Contrast this with the aftermath of WW2. On that occasion, all of the perpetrators that could be identified were hunted down for the rest of their lives and the lives of the hunters and the harmed. The ones that were found and judged to be guilty of war crimes, which included the slaughter of millions of innocents, they went down for it. The age old excuses ie.
– I was just following orders.
– I only did what I had to do in the context of the situation.
– I was just a small cog in a large machine. I had no control over it.
These reasons did not wash with the war crimes tribunals and the courts.

So the question right here and now is:
How are we at fixhepc going to judge this monumental failure to eradicate hepC, which is the very raison d’etre of fixhepc in the first place? Is this just a place where people tow the party line, ie. Gilead is evil, end of!
Or can we have something approaching a rational ethical debate?

I mean, here we stand in the middle of what I would take for a sci-fi movie if I didn’t know it was real. The World being held to ransom by one company who rations out the life-saving drugs that are needed for 150 million people, ensuring a perpetual plague, – c’mon, how likely is that?

So is it the fault of Gilead’s CEO?
Then how do you square it that he could not do what he is doing without agreement and collusion from his high command?
Where do you draw the line?
Do you stop with Gilead’s high command, and exonerate everybody else?

Well, this is what they actually did after ww2. They joined up the dots all the way down to the people who designed and built the ovens and must have had some idea as to their intended use. They went for them. Was that blame misplaced? You decide. After 2008 they did nothing of the kind. Nobody caused 2008 apparently, it just kinda happened. A select few got filthy rich. That just kinda happened too. All legal.

So what I’m getting to is this. I guess it is up to us to decide what kind of court we are running here and where we want to draw the line. Is it not incumbent on us to do a little better than “Gilead is Evil” for the millions of people without a voice who will continue to suffer and die from hepC because of this monumental debacle? Maybe there should be a “Name & Shame” list set up, maybe not here but someplace. Maybe there should be historical documentation done by somebody about how on God’s green earth we all let this mess happen? And how it might be prevented again in the future – probably futile but we have to try, don’t we?

And finally an acknowledgement of the work done by Greg and the Doc and the few others who have had the courage to make a stand, the bright stars in a murky sky.

dt

If you are looking for justification for any of the players in this saga then it can always be found.

I was speaking to a shareholder of Gilead the other day. He felt that he was doing the right thing to buy into Gilead, on the basis that pharmaceutical companies need investment to continue developing life-saving drugs for humanity.

There are many shades of grey in this tapestry.

dt

And while I am at it, let’s not forget about the founders of Pharmasset who sold out to Gilead for 11B. They had an exceptionally brilliant company and developed sofosbuvir in the first place. They knew what they had, ie. the backbone of all ifn-free combos to come for the foreseeable future. As in – they knew they had the future medical equivalent of the internet. They also had a choice. Take the money and run, or take less money but ensure that sofosbuvir would be used in a humanitarian way. The GREED started with THEM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmasset

dt