Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison

My Least Brethren

More than fifteen million people die each year from infectious diseases and forty million have HIV/AIDS. In Swaziland alone, forty per cent of the population have AIDS. One despairs in situations of such human suffering where nothing apparently can be done to save the lives of the poor or of sick children. Yet, drugs that can cure or ease the pain and prolong the lives of these people - including those in the third world suffering from treatable conditions such as diabetes and asthma - have been developed, patented and produced by big pharmaceutical companies, mostly in the USA.

These drugs are expensive to buy (and are often pegged artificially high) but the rich and other consumers, perhaps you and me among them, can afford the medicines, and the pharmaceutical companies make huge fortunes in profits.

One of the arguments these companies (many of which bankroll the Bush White House) use to maintain the high costs of their medicines is that their profits allow them to spend millions on further development and research. This is partly true but cannot mask the higher proportion of returns in profits directed to the manufacturers and shareholders.

Incidentally, the issue of medical research they refer to also provides a powerful argument that governments take on the principal responsibility for financing the development of affordable drugs. But for a government to do something sensible like that with taxes smacks of a national health system and we can’t have that! Why it’s almost communism!

Countries such as Brazil, India and China - can produce the same drugs or derivatives of the US pharmaceuticals’ at a fraction of the cost. Under capitalism and its philosophy of laissez faire (non-interference in the ‘free market’; allowing markets to find their own level) these countries should be allowed to export their cheap medicines and compete on the open market. But this is where the goalposts have been shifted. Under World Trade Organisation rules Brazil, India and China can use these generic medicines for their own people but are not allowed to export them! Poor countries in South Africa and elsewhere, which are in desperate need of the medicines, but have not the manufacturing base to produce them, can only buy them from the original manufacturers - the big US- and European-based pharmaceutical companies!

The arguments over this anomaly came to a head two weeks ago at the World Trade Organisation negotiations when US Vice-President Dick Cheney torpedoed a deal to allow poor countries to have access to cheap drugs. As one editorial put it: “The richest nation on the earth backed the arguments of the drug lobby over the cries of the weak and wasted.” US President George Bush also refused to contribute the USA’s fair share to a United Nations global fund to fights AIDS, TB and malaria. Instead, he has offered $200 million, which amounts to 0.2 per cent of the $100 billion devoted to overthrowing Saddam Hussein and his elusive Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University has attacked Bush’s priorities and called upon him to employ Weapons of Mass Salvation which he defines as the arsenal of life-saving vaccines, medicines and health interventions, emergency food aid and farming technologies that could avert literally millions of deaths each year in the wars against epidemic disease, drought and famine.

Imagine if the US was to take on such a role! Imagine how different the world would be, how proud it would be to be called ‘an American’. But that is to fantasise and ignore the realities and hypocrisies of power politics.

In his inaugural address as President George W Bush said: “America at its best is compassionate. In the quiet of American conscience, we know that deep, persistent poverty is unworthy of our nation's promise. And whatever our views of its cause, we can agree that children at risk are not at fault.

Abandonment and abuse are not acts of God, they are failures of love. And the proliferation of prisons, however necessary, is no substitute for hope and order in our souls. Where there is suffering, there is duty.”

Hundreds of thousands of children have died from disease and hunger in Iraq as a result of the US-sponsored sanctions. More civilians died in the bombing to liberate Afghanistan than were killed on September 11th. The souls on death row in the USA have no hope of compassion. Any person in any country can be seized by US forces, transported half-way around the world, be held and questioned for any length of time without access to legal counsel, without being charged, without a bail hearing, without rights or protection.

George Bush claims to be a Christian. There is a quote from St Matthew in the New Testament, referring to the day of judgement when the nations of the earth are separated and the righteous judged. Jesus tells them, “I was hungry, and you gave me to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me to drink; I was a stranger, and you took me in; naked, and you clothed me; sick, and you visited me; I was in prison and you came to me.”

The righteous are bewildered because they cannot remember helping Jesus in such circumstances. He answers them twice:

“Amen I say to you, as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me… Amen I say to you, as long as you did it not to one of these least, neither did you do it to me.”

Helping my least brethren. Now there is a love-conscious, revolutionary, Christian thought with which to begin the New Year.

< Prev ... Next >

[ back ]