Missing Medicines Speaker Tour

Global Justice Now Missing Medicines Speaker Tour – Sick of corporate greed

We’re excited to have Sibongile Tshabalala, deputy general secretary of the Treatment Action Campaign, South Africa, join for the whole tour! Plus Global Justice Now speakers and others to be announced.

From our Missing Medicines campaign, we know one way to fast-track ending AIDS is to make sure everybody has access to the medicines they need. But in our current system, drugs are often either too expensive or missing altogether.

Millions of people around the world suffer and die from treatable conditions because they cannot afford to pay for expensive medicine. Even in the UK, the NHS has to reject or ration some drugs for HIV co-infections, like Hepatitis C, because pharmaceutical companies are charging too much money for them. Yet the pharmaceutical industry is the most profitable in the world.

Drug companies justify high prices by claiming they need to recoup their research and development costs. But nine of the top ten pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing than on research and development. And most innovative early-stage research is actually publicly-funded.

We say it’s time to put people before profit in the global drug industry.