May 2002 has marked the second anniversary of the « Accelerating Access » initiative, launched by UNAIDS in a partnership with several UN agencies (WHO, FNUAP, UNICEF and the World Bank) and five pharmaceutical companies (Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Glaxo SmithKline, Merck & Co., and Hoffman-La Roche ).
Since the end of 2001 this initiative has been under the responsibility of the WHO.
« Accelerating Access » was supposed to provide developing countries with access to medicine at the lowest possible prices, as well as provide technical support for the implementation of national access programs for antiretroviral treatment.
Two years later, people with aids examine the results. Accelerating Access serves, above all, pharmaceutical companies who profit from a partnership with international institutions while using the program to maintain their monopolies and to limit any reductions in price.
According to the most optimistic of estimates, after two years Accelerating Access has only resulted in getting an additional 0.1% of people with aids on treatment (indeed, WHO rates at 10 million the number of people requiring immediate antiretroviral therapy).
More than just bad results in terms of medicines provided and lives saved, AAI is causing numerous damages that the WHO and UNAIDS have not only been incapable of stopping but that have accepted to cover for. These damages are: instrumentalisation of international health institutions, discrimination between recipient countries, market fixing, short-circuiting of the national drug circulation systems, and spurring irrational dangerous prescriptions (for more information, click here and see English PDF version).
Accelerating Access is a striking example of a dishonest compromise between international institutions and the pharmaceutical industry at the expense of people and public health.
The WHO must not allow developing countries to enter into agreements with private companies unless they can guarantee transparent negotiations that respect basic ethical standards and eventually provide results.
Besides, the WHO cannot use partnerships with brand-name companies as an excuse deliberately to ignore the fact that access to generics has been a determining factor in the drop in prices of several ARVs those past years. As a matter of fact, competition between brand-name and generic drugs remains the long-term solution for access to the widest and most complete range of treatments possible at the lowest prices.
However, by putting forward the question of differential pricing at the WHA — which would be nothing but an agreement with brand-name companies —, Gro Harlem Brudtland, the Director-General of the WHO, has chosen to dismiss this determining question.
At a time when the negotiations on the export of generics are at their height at the TRIPS Council of the WTO, the Director-General of the WHO refuses to learn from the past and her putting the fate of sick people into the hands of Big Pharma once more is a sentence of death for people with AIDS.
