Fire in the Blood Economics 340
Pharmaceutical companies make millions of their profit because of the ability to create a
market monopoly through a patent. A patent is a government authority or license conferring a
right or title for a set period, especially the sole right to exclude others from making, using, or
selling an invention. Companies create a patent for their newly created drug, allowing them to
sell this drug at whatever price they desire. Fire in the Blood is a movie describing and
explaining the fight against pharmaceutical companies that block the creation of generic brand
AIDS drugs.
In 1996, a combination of three antiretroviral drugs proved successful against fighting
HIV, from the day forward being diagnosed with AIDS was no longer known as a death
sentence. These drugs were sold internationally at prices over $15,000 per patient per year,
however the prices were too high for millions of people suffering from HIV. Fluconazole, created
by Pfizer and sold under the brand name Diflucan, sold for less than 5 US cents per capsule in
Thailand, meanwhile in South Africa they were paying more than $30 per capsule. Pfizer's
patent made it illegal for other companies to imitate and create identical generic brands of the
drug, importation of any generic brand was illegal. In 2000, Pfizer's sales of Fluconazole were
$1 billion per year, with prices of up to $40 per tablet. The average weekly wage in South Africa,
the continent's richest country, was $68. Part of the reason people did not want to treat the third
world countries in Africa was because they thought the disease would gain resistance from the
drugs and kill Americans and Europeans. Brazil and Thailand began to sell generic brands
behind closed doors to treat their own population.
The day Dr. Hamied's offer in Brussels, the 10 biggest pharma companies on the fortune
500 list, were more profitable than the next 490 companies combined. These companies spend
almost all of their profit into marketing and advertising, and very little into research and
development. 84% for world wide drug discovery is funded by government and public sources,
meanwhile pharma companies are funding only 12%. At the time of this documentary, 7 of the
10 HIV drugs being sold in the market were not created or discovered by the people that are
selling them. People were buying into the belief that counterfeit and generic drugs coming out of
India would be dirty and substandard, yet this was not the case. A man being interviewed
described the laboratories as "spotless" and went on to explain that most of the generic drugs
being sold in the US today were developed in India, as well as the ingredients of the brand name
drug. After 9/11 the US government cited a public health emergency that temporarily suspended
a patent on the drug cipro because of the recent deaths. However in Africa people are still dying
every day from HIV yet the patent thrives. The US government warned countries i