Responding to today's NYT article extolling Clinton's post-presidential AIDS work, Dean Baker writes:
Clinton was the person who allowed the pharmaceutical industry to use the power of the U.S. trade office to get the TRIPS provisions into the 1995 Uruguay Round agreement of the W.T.O. These provisions will limit the access to generic drugs for billions of people in the developing world, in some cases raising the price of AIDS drugs by several thousand percent.
Even in his last years in office, Clinton harassed the South African government over its efforts to issue compulsory licenses for drugs used to treat AIDS victims. He didn't back down until protestors associated with ACT-UP began trailing Al Gore at his campaign events.
It's good to see President Clinton now working to help AIDS sufferers in the developing world, but it is unlikely that he will be able to undo the harm caused by the policies put in place during his presidency.
Interesting. The TRIPS provision, which I'm not hugely familiar with, is the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, which codifies and creates enforcement mechanisms for protecting and preserving patent integrity in developing nations. In doing, it kept countries being buffeted by the AIDS pandemic from breaking the patents on retroviral drugs they couldn't afford. My understanding is that there's a "compulsory licensing" which allows countries to manufacture generics in service of the public health, and even export them to other affected countries (so long as they're not doing it for profit). I, however, am not an expert on this stuff, and would love to see Baker or another informed voice elaborate.
