Protest marchers converged on the US embassy in Pretoria yesterday to show their anger at perceived US government support for an attempt by pharmaceutical companies - many of them US-based - to secure the scrapping of a law aimed at facilitating the supply of cheaper drugs to the sick and the poor in South Africa, particularly those suffering from HIV-AIDS.
The march, watched by international observers, including representatives of Oxfam and Medecins Sans Frontieres, coincided with start of a hearing before the Pretoria High Court on an application by the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers' Association of South Africa, known locally as the PMA, to have the Medicines and Related Substances Amendment Act declared unlawful.
The law was placed on the stature book in 1997 when Mr Nelson Mandela was president. If lawyers representing the government succeed in thwarting the pharmaceutical companies in their attempt to have the law rescinded - or the relevant portions of it - President Thabo Mbeki may benefit politically, despite his continuing reluctance to sanction the provision of anti-retroviral drugs to HIVAIDS patients in state hospitals.
Though the pending court battle is largely a South African affair, the outcome could have international repercussions, particularly as US-based pharmaceutical companies are re presented in the 40-odd companies seeking legal redress. If the law is upheld and the South Africa government moves to supply HIV-AIDS patients with cheaper drugs, either by making or importing lower cost generic equivalents of the patented drugs, it could provide a precedent for developing countries to take similar action.
Ms Mirryena Deeb, head of the PMA, said of the pending legal battle: "It's a fight about whether the SA government respects the rule of law. The Act contravenes the country's constitution and its own Patents Act. It will do nothing for access to quality and affordable medicines".
A related argument advanced steadfastly by the PMA from the outset of the controversy is that the manufacture or importation of cheaper generic drugs may result in patients receiving inferior drugs, to their detriment.
But AIDS activists and their sympathisers were unimpressed with either the PMA's legal arguments or its declared concern that patients could suffer by receiving poor-quality drugs.
The bottom line for demonstrators in Pretoria yesterday was that the pharmaceutical companies were using legal and quasi-moral arguments to mask their determination to defend their profits.
In a joint statement, Oxfam and Medecins San Frontieres characterised the PMA legal action as a warning to developing countries that "many within the world's pharmaceutical industry will use any tactic to defend their patents, whatever the cost in human suffering".
The marchers put it more bluntly. Their posters read: "To hell with patent rights when it comes to our lives" and "Lives before profits".
An AIDS sufferer in Pretoria yesterday, lamenting the high cost of drugs provided by the pharmaceutical establishment and inability of the poor to pay for them, said simply: "I am poor. Thabo Mbeki is right. People are not dying of AIDS. They are dying because they are poor".
The combination of drugs considered to be most effective in delaying the onset of AIDS in HIV-infected patients costs an estimated $950 a month - way above the affordability level of individuals in the poorer communities of the developing world and even of governments in those countries, such as South Africa, where there are millions of HIV-affected people.