On Friday 1st December 2017, World Aids Day, we set up a ‘Free Sick-Health Lottery’ in Reading. If people took a card they had a one in three chance of ‘winning the medicines they needed’!
While people were looking at the cards, we took the opportunity to explain that millions of people are denied access to vital medicine because of the extortionate prices set by the pharmaceutical companies: Almost two billion people world wide lack access to essential medicines. About 10 million people die every year because they can’t afford medicines.
STOP AIDS and Global Justice Now have written a new report, Pills and Profits: How drug companies make a killing out of public research . It is backed by over 20 health and patient organisations. It calls for attaching strings to taxpayer funding, greater transparency in drug pricing, and for a radical overhaul in the way the research and development of new medicines are funded.
