Drugmakers’ attitudes toward helping Africa have changed since the late 1990s, when Western companies were pilloried for refusing to lower prices on their AIDS drugs as millions here died.
Now nearly all companies offer a combination of donations and “tiered pricing,” under which they charge poor countries a small fraction of what they charge rich ones — but impose safeguards to prevent smuggling of their products into wealthy markets.
Companies compete to rise higher on the Access to Medicines Index, which ranks them on how well they do at getting their products to the world’s poor.
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John Young, president of Pfizer’s essential health group, said the price-cut deal differs from Pfizer’s charitable donations, like the 500 million antibiotics doses it provided to help eliminate the eye disease trachoma.
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“The challenge of pure philanthropy is that it’s not infinitely sustainable,” Mr. Young said. “We expect to make no money on this — but we also don’t want to lose money.”
The company will charge enough to cover just its manufacturing and packaging costs, not those related to research, marketing or advertising, he said.
Cipla’s prices, said Dr. Denis Broun, the company’s head of governmental affairs, will be as low as one-eighth of what it charges for generics in the United States. The company hopes to start making cancer drugs soon at its factories in Uganda and South Africa, he added.
A Strategy for Poor Nations
Cipla has a long tradition of serving poor countries. In 2001, its chairman, Yusuf K. Hamied, shocked the global pharmaceutical industry by offering a triple-therapy AIDS cocktail for $350 a year to Doctors Without Borders at a time Western companies were charging $12,000.
That offer set off a price cascade that in turn led to the creation of donor agencies like Pepfar and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
The current deal started taking shape two years ago, when Dr. O’Brien, an epidemiologist and palliative care expert, convinced the leadership of the American Cancer Society to give the Clinton Health Access Initiative a grant to study the market and approach pharmaceutical companies.
The initiative, known as CHAI (pronounced “chy”), is largely independent of the better-known Clinton Foundation, though Mr. Clinton and his daughter, Chelsea, are on its board.
Foreign donations to the foundation while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state raised questions of conflict of interest during her presidential campaign. Had Mrs. Clinton won, the family and former White House staffers would have resigned from CHAI’s board, and it would have dropped the Clinton name.
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For several years, Dr. O’Brien was chief of H.I.V. mathematical modeling at CHAI.
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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/07/health/africa-cancer-drugs.html