Pharma is only interested in making medicines for rich countries – leads to vaccine inequities

Can you expand on how Big Pharma’s practices affect access to medicine in the Global South?

The pharmaceutical industry is not interested in making medicines for diseases suffered primarily by poor people in poor countries, like malaria and tuberculosis. In terms of diseases that affect both rich and poor countries, if cutting-edge medicines are stretching very rich countries with national health systems, it’s simply impossible to afford them in most other countries.

Let me give you an example of the first problem. There’s some interesting work into a new malaria vaccine, but lots of the initial research was done by the US Army. They handed the research to the British company GSK.

It turns out that GSK never really had much interest in finding a malaria vaccine, because it wouldn’t make huge profits. However, one of the key ingredients in that malaria vaccine is extremely useful in producing a vaccine for shingles, which is also suffered by people in rich countries, and GSK put all their time and effort into researching the shingles vaccine.

But as with COVID, it wouldn’t share its information on that key ingredient with anybody else, as that would damage their monopoly on the shingles vaccine. So GSK is sitting on information that could be vital in dealing with what is still one of the world’s worst killers.

We shouldn’t be surprised. When HIV was spreading through southern Africa in the ’90s, we already had drugs that could have prevented transmission from mothers to babies and massively extended lives. Yet nobody in southern Africa could afford those drugs. When the government of South Africa passed a piece of legislation that would have allowed it to import cheaper generics of those drugs, thirty-nine pharmaceutical corporations took them to court and accused the government of piracy — of stealing their “intellectual property.”

There’s currently a huge monkeypox outbreak going on in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Five hundred people died last year, and twelve thousand people have been affected, but there has not been a single vaccine in the DRC. As soon as monkeypox came to the West last year, there was a rush for vaccines. Now the Global North has forgotten about it.

In my book, I quote writer Robin Henig, who argues that what constitutes an epidemic in the eyes of the medical establishment is one white person dying of a disease. There’s so much racism in the way we think about access to medicines.