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I favor limiting patent protection for medications. Medicine should be used to heal people, not make profits. (Profits are fine, but healing comes first.) if Gilead can't/won't make Truvada affordable for all, then their patents should be voided and the drugs should be produced and distributed at cost. India licensed manufacture of generic Truvada. It costs less than $100 for a year's supply there. Private property rights, including patents, are not absolute nor paramount.
I just noticed John E is all over the internet voicing his support for PrEP, trying to compare ALL arguements against it to antisex fundamentalist propaganda. How much is Gilead paying you John E?
Truvada as "PrEP" isn't going to benefit anyone in the long term except Gilead. Look at most risk groups, and ask yourself if they'll really benefit in real-world situations. This is classic patent law manipulation at its most obvious. If Gilead can find a new use for the drug, they can renew their patent, and with it, stave off the financial collapse analysts predict at Truvada's patent expiration. What amazes me is that Gilead accomplished this with such broad public support.
John Eisenhans,care to compare the costs of the two interventions Condoms V Truvada?We are talking about Africa here. Given its setting,I would actually go further to say this study wasn't ethical. I don't believe in doing studies of products in populations that have no chance of affording them upon approval.We can barely get HAART for patients who actually need it to survive and have thus resorted to using conservative treatment guidelines that bar treatment until CD4s are below 200.
Well obviously the problem is whether the women in question failed to adhere to their regime. The critical issue is whether real people, in a non-research setting, over a prolonged period of time, are actually going to do a better job without the intensive counseling and monitoring, or if the drugs will just encourage a sense of complacency about condoms amidst similar susceptability to the virus. Of f**k it, clearly you people don't care about those nuances. PREP NOW!!! Right everyone?
Actually, this article does NOT state that the reason the trial failed was non-adherence to the medication. It states that the women claimed about 95% adherence but that in the iPrEx (a completely different trial) fewer than 50% had the drug in their blood. Yes, the author should have written the sentence better so as to make it clear he or she was talking about two different groups of people, but in any case, they won't know what caused this failure until they do a post hoc analysis.
I think the author of this article missed the opportunity to reveal the underlying issue here. Even though it was remotely suggested, it is important to stress that the reason for the "failure" of the study, was not that the drugs failed, but that the test subjects failed to adhere to the regimine. That was the callousal failure here. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater OK?
Rodney
Gilead's first response at the announcement of PrEP's success was that it had no intention of lowering the price of Truvada, and they've already raised its price for this year. As for "Indian drugs", CIPLA is or will be limited in the number of generics it can produce. I certainly hope you don't advocate westerners violating intnernational trade laws, putting mystery pills into our bodies and taking drugs out of African's mouths so that we can have safer bareback fun.
April 27, 2011 • San Francisco