peripheries

Compassionate democracies

June 8th, 2008 | by User Image

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In her book The Wisdom of Whores Elizabeth Pisani observes that “Funnily enough, it is often those [governments] that are secure in their popular majority (such as Thatcher in 1986) or those that don’t have to worry too much about voters (such as Iran and China) that can afford to be compassionate.” (p.254)

This against-the-flow statement has gained some weight this week when Public Health Minister Chaiya Sasomsab of the 2007 democratically elected Thai government announced that the the compulsory licences (CL) issued by the military government of Surayud Chulanont soon after the September 19, 2006 coup d’etat to bypass drug patents and widen access to life-saving medicines, should soon be scrapped (The Bangkok Post, June 7, 2008).

The Bangkok Post reported Chaya saying on the sidelines of his talks with a joint committee comprising representatives of pharmaceutical companies and patients groups and officials from the Commerce, Foreign Affairs, and Public Health ministries that ”[CL] is not right, especially when the drugs industry has already invested billions in research and development.”

Considering that there is little evidence if any that R&D investment reflects the cost of developing new drugs (see my article on this subject) would this decision have something to do with satisfying some commercial interests with the US which last year upgraded Thailand on the Priority Watch List for intellectual property violations?

Interestingly, this week also saw the military in Uganda coming to the conclusion that AIDS was a security threat. “A combat enemy is easy to deal with. You can know what kind of weapon he is using, you can even know the capabilities that he has, but with AIDS, it is a different cup of tea”, said Gen. Katumba Wamala commander of the Land Forces adding, “it affects the most important military resource; the personnel.” Back in the early 90, it was a not-so-democratic Museveni who embarked on a nationwide tour of Uganda to tell people that avoiding AIDS was a patriotic duty and it was a military government in Thailand that implemented a ‘100 percent condom program’.

Have democracies forgotten about compassion when it comes to public health? “Those [government] that looks skittishly over their shoulders at every opinion poll (Washington, Jakarta) are more likely to allow dogma to overcome reason. That suggest that it is voters, rather than governments, who lack compassion.” (ibid.) concludes Elizabeth Pisani.

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