A lot of folks are celebrating Brazil’s decision to declare AIDS a national emergency and basically ignore patents on AIDS drugs.
There is a lot of debate back and forth over patents for lifesaving drugs, with pharma. companies claiming the prices they charge are necessary to pay for continued research and development, and AIDS activists and others charging that this is nonsense.
Before the celebration over Brazil’s actions go into high gear, it might be worth taking the time to survey the current state of vaccine development and production.
For a variety of reasons, it is very difficult to make a profit on vaccines. They are difficult to research, and often even more difficult to manufacture. The political situation in Western countries has really focused intense attention to even minor side effects of vaccines, with a couple prominent vaccines (such as for rotavirus) being recalled.
So how have companies reacted? Most major pharmaceutical companies won’t go near vaccine development with a ten foot pole. Those few that do focus almost exclusively on vaccines for diseases affect those in the developed world.
My daughter’s generation, for example, was one of the first to receive a chicken pox vaccination. Now, I think it’s great there is a chicken pox vaccination, and yes, in some rare instances chicken pox can be life threatening, but chicken pox is hardly a deadly scourge.
Compare that to the malaria vaccine. Well, we could do that in theory if there were a malaria vaccine. Not only is there no vaccine yet for malaria, but most drug companies don’t even have major efforts to find such a vaccine. Certainly nobody is putting the sort of money into finding a malaria vaccine as they are for other vaccines.
And it would be kind of pointless to do so. Not only would a malaria vaccine likely not be profitable, but it probably wouldn’t even recoup its development costs by the time companies were forced to give it away.
Look, for example, at how bad the business climate is in Africa. Nobody wants to invest in Africa so several governments there are going to create a special insurance company just to issue policies to reduce the political risks of doing business on that continent (i.e. Robert Mugabe might decide some of his cronies need your company more than you do).