{"id":202238,"date":"2021-06-13T16:20:23","date_gmt":"2021-06-13T16:20:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/radiofree.asia\/?guid=88f37884e2aff4a72921395b68bacae2"},"modified":"2021-06-13T16:20:23","modified_gmt":"2021-06-13T16:20:23","slug":"activism-made-aids-treatment-more-accessible-thats-what-itll-take-for-covid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/06\/13\/activism-made-aids-treatment-more-accessible-thats-what-itll-take-for-covid\/","title":{"rendered":"Activism Made AIDS Treatment More Accessible \u2014 That\u2019s What It\u2019ll Take for COVID"},"content":{"rendered":"\"Participants<\/a>

While many in the U.S. have breathed an understandable sigh of relief as COVID cases sharply decline across the country, cases have continued to climb across much of the world where the number of available vaccines ranges from few<\/a> to none<\/a>. And after President Joe Biden came out in support of waiving intellectual property protections for coronavirus vaccines, the pharmaceutical industry began furiously lobbying governments<\/a> in Germany, Japan, and elsewhere to maintain the patents that block other companies and labs from increasing the global vaccine supply. <\/p>\n

The global fight for affordable COVID vaccines is becoming one of the defining issues of our time, and it has many lessons to learn from the struggle to win global access to AIDS treatment drugs. For the past three decades, coalitions like the South Africa\u2019s Treatment Access Campaign<\/a> have mounted successful campaigns against drug companies making obscene profits from AIDS medications that many sufferers of the disease couldn\u2019t afford. There are many parallels between the impact of AIDS and COVID within the United States as well, especially the disproportionate impact both diseases have had on poor people of color — and the outrageous disregard that policy makers have displayed toward them. <\/p>\n

Sam Friedman is an international AIDS researcher<\/a> who has specialized since the early 1980s in studying HIV harm reduction among people who use drugs. He is also a longtime socialist writer and activist<\/a> who has written about subjects ranging from rank-and-file organizing inside the Teamsters union<\/a> to the global movement for access to affordable AIDS treatment<\/a>. In this interview, Friedman talks about the lessons to be drawn from the movement to lower prices for vital AIDS treatments, why both AIDS and COVID have disproportionately hit poor people of color, and why people who rightfully mistrust pharmaceutical executives should still believe in the effectiveness of their vaccines. <\/p>\n

Danny Katch: The current fight against to make COVID vaccines accessible and affordable across the world builds on the long struggle to do the same for AIDS treatments. What lessons can activists can draw today from that movement? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Sam Friedman:<\/strong> First, AIDS activists had to fight the U.S. government to get more research funding and for fast-track methods to make promising drugs available to those getting sick and dying. They won on this, so academic researchers worked with pharmaceutical companies to develop and test promising drugs. The pharmaceutical companies patented them and sold them at high prices to make great profits. Researchers and companies also tried to create vaccines for HIV \u2014 with no success so far, but they learned a lot about immunology and viruses that I\u2019m sure contributed enormously to developing COVID vaccines and therapies. <\/p>\n

In course of the AIDS struggles, community groups organized first to get research done. Later, they remobilized to make the drugs available all over the world at a price people could afford. That involved lots of struggles — including some mass actions in South Africa — and threats by certain governments (who had pharmaceutical industries in their own countries) to break the patents based on a public necessity argument. This was first fought and won in Brazil, and then India got involved. Now, in 2021, we are waging similar fights to make COVID vaccines available. <\/p>\n

Importantly, every time the drug companies change their formulations at all, they can reopen negotiations. So, this led to a series of interminable negotiations over prices that led to the bureaucratization of the community side. <\/p>\n

The movements around AIDS have been activist and powerful enough to get the U.S., UN, and foundations to promise to fund treatment for everyone who got infected. This has saved millions of lives, and helped pharmaceutical companies to be among the most profitable in the world \u2014 but nonetheless, these countries and institutions have never provided sufficient funds and probably never will. And almost a million people still die of AIDS every year. <\/p>\n