{"id":17995,"date":"2021-05-09T03:30:27","date_gmt":"2021-05-09T03:30:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/barazalab.com\/?p=17995"},"modified":"2023-09-04T05:40:31","modified_gmt":"2023-09-04T05:40:31","slug":"telling-the-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tuwele.com\/baraza_update\/telling-the-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Telling The Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Greetings, friends:<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been watching the documentary Fire In The Blood on Netflix slowly over a number of days in the past fortnight, on how multinational pharmaceutical companies deliberately prevented low-cost antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) reaching those who needed them in Africa and other parts of the global south in the 1990s and early 2000s. I had to watch it slowly because it shook me more than I was prepared for, and I\u2019m not exaggerating when I say once the credits were rolling I cried real tears. For those of us born in the 1980s and after, for whom HIV\/Aids has always been a reality, it is sometimes difficult to grasp how much work was done, for years, against impossible odds, to get ARVs to those who needed them in Africa.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What was more bewildering was the arguments that Western drug companies were making to justify this crime against humanity. One of the most inane was that people in Africa don\u2019t own watches and\/or don\u2019t know how to tell the time, and with ARVs needing to be taken on a strict timed schedule, Africans wouldn\u2019t take the drugs properly, thus leading to drug resistance\u2026 and then a mutated, drug-resistant version of the virus could potentially find its way to Europe and America. So, to forestall this hypothetical situation, the US government and Big Pharma stubbornly defended patents of ARVs, leading to the deaths of some 10 MILLION people.<\/span><\/p>\n

The parallels with the current Covid-19 pandemic are clear. <\/span>Vaccine nationalism is patently unjust,<\/span><\/a> wrote Nanjala Nyabola in March; over the past six months, rich countries have hoarded vaccines, blocked temporary waivers of patent protections, and \u201cadvised\u201d poor countries to avoid vaccines from Russia and China. There was a small victory this week, when the Biden administration said it <\/span>would support <\/span><\/a>a move at the World Trade Organization (WTO) to temporarily lift patent protections for coronavirus vaccines. Still, if the fight for ARVs is anything to go by, it\u2019s not cause for celebration yet. The pharma companies are now saying that lifting Covid-19 vaccine patent protections won\u2019t really help poor countries, that it is <\/span>akin to<\/span><\/a> \u201chanding out a recipe without sharing the method or the ingredients, and could lead to quality issues and less efficient production\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

I say all this to say, watch Fire in the Blood. It is, in my view, one of the most powerful I\u2019ve watched in a long time, the best kind of storytelling in the public interest. And take a moment to grieve the many million lives needlessly, cruelly lost, in the interest of profits before people.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now that you know what We\u2019ve Been Watching, here\u2019s:<\/span><\/p>\n