Patents before patients? - New Europe http://www.neurope.eu/articles/Patents-before-patients/105936.php

Both my parents are pharmacists, so I grew up surrounded by medicines and people who relied on them to stay alive. The idea, then, that access to vital treatment should ever be denied horrifies me. What horrifies me more is that there is a bunch of lobbyists in Brussels who get paid handsomely to argue that such access should be restricted to the better-off.

Using freedom of information rules, I have obtained a few hundred documents exchanged between the European Commission and pharmaceutical corporations. Not everything I asked for has been released but there is enough here to realise that the myopic profit-fixated recommendations of Big Pharma are routinely swallowed by civil servants and regurgitated as official EU policy.

Time and again, the documents given to me indicate there is a cosy relationship between the Commission and Big Pharma. Numerous meetings are held between the two sides, without any input from public health advocates or campaigners against poverty. And I was particularly interested to learn that some emails journalists send to the Commission are passed on to the drugs industry. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the correspondence is the inconsistency in it. While Big Pharma does everything to thwart competition from cheaper generics, it still sucks up to the EU hierarchy by proclaiming its commitment to “competitiveness” at every opportunity. In one 2010 letter EFPIA’s Andrew Whitty wrote: “The challenge is to find a policy approach that delivers fast access to medicine, enhanced competitiveness, balanced budgets and reward for innovation.”