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20260915 013000 UTC
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[00:00:29] How are you? This is Jorge Gestoso, in today's
[00:00:33] program, the Industrial Pharmaceutical model,
[00:00:36] with another notable guest, Jennifer
[00:00:39] Cardona Malaber, coordinator of the People's
[00:00:42] Health Movement, directly
[00:00:46] from Bogotá, Jennifer Cardona Malaber, a warm
[00:00:50] welcome to the program, cordial greetings, how
[00:00:52] are you, very well, Jennifer, to what
[00:00:56] extent is the industrial pharmaceutical model not?
[00:01:00] It's nothing more than a business that revolves
[00:01:03] industry works and the way around what you have Jennifer, you are in the called
[00:01:06] "diseaseology," generally medicines
[00:01:09] and health technologies in
[00:01:13] general have
[00:01:15] been routed in that way of being a business that profits the
[00:01:19] large pharmaceutical
[00:01:20] even the resources of industry and therefore what interests
[00:01:23] them is to continue feeding health
[00:01:26] systems and health in terms of illness. But they are
[00:01:30] not interested in curing anything, they are interested in alleviating and
[00:01:33] sustaining some symptoms of
[00:01:36] individual people and that's why
[00:01:40] the large pharmaceutical industry
[00:01:43] feeds every day
[00:01:46] on it. It
[00:01:50] makes the medicines, the same
[00:01:52] medicines that have been used for
[00:01:55] high cost, and that a long time, currently be developed with
[00:01:58] other types of more advanced technologies with the same
[00:02:01] effects, with the same components, but they
[00:02:05] call them biotechnological medicines and what
[00:02:08] it does is make them more expensive medicines, but not with
[00:02:11] that synchronicity or that purpose of curing
[00:02:17] this year, in the a disease or treating a medical diagnosis, but of continuing
[00:02:20] to profit and fatten the
[00:02:23] pockets of the people who own these
[00:02:26] multinationals. And who decides which medicine
[00:02:30] to develop? The large pharmaceutical industry is the one that
[00:02:34] decides which medicines are developed, but here the most
[00:02:37] important thing is which medicines are not
[00:02:40] developed or which medicines are not
[00:02:43] of interest to certain actors to enter
[00:02:46] the market. For example, here they have waged a
[00:02:49] war against generic medicines, which
[00:02:53] are much more affordable medicines for
[00:02:56] people's pockets and that have the same
[00:03:00] model? Yes, from the direct effect, but since they do not generate the desired
[00:03:04] profitability, what they do is create
[00:03:07] a whole scenario to prevent them from being produced, especially in countries that
[00:03:10] have health sovereignty, that produce their own medicines
[00:03:14] and health technologies, they prevent
[00:03:18] that, through lobbying and the scenarios of
[00:03:21] power relations that they also have, and what is
[00:03:25] a pharmaceutical patent?
[00:03:28] Well, a pharmaceutical
[00:03:30] 100% of what patent is a legal
[00:03:34] mechanism that establishes that
[00:03:37] the guidelines of a state temporarily grants the right or
[00:03:39] exclusivity over an invention that meets certain requirements,
[00:03:43] in this case, on medicines or
[00:03:46] on let's say health
[00:03:49] technologies, specifically we are talking about active ingredients,
[00:03:53] the compositions of medicines, the manufacturing
[00:03:57] processes of the formulas.
[00:04:00] of other technological
[00:04:02] innovations, so ultimately it is a process
[00:04:06] that establishes the relationship between knowledge, the
[00:04:09] knowledge of producing a certain medicine or health
[00:04:12] technology, property and who has
[00:04:15] access to it and who does not. Critics say
[00:04:18] that through patents,
[00:04:22] development, and precisely you were talking about there is actually a huge transfer of resources from the global
[00:04:25] South to the global North. Do you agree?
[00:04:29] Absolutely. I agree because precisely what
[00:04:32] they have done is deny the
[00:04:36] involved in medicine, possibility for people to access medicines at lower costs and
[00:04:40] much more easily. We have the case of medicines
[00:04:44] for example for HIV/AIDS, which are
[00:04:47] medicines that
[00:04:50] are of public health interest, that is, there is an
[00:04:53] urgent need for many, for a considerable
[00:04:56] number of the population to access these medicines.
[00:05:00] But due to the denial of that patent to states, it makes
[00:05:04] the costs much higher
[00:05:07] and the bureaucratic procedures to access those
[00:05:11] medicines either much more complicated, in
[00:05:14] the particular case of some
[00:05:17] rare
[00:05:19] diseases, quote-unquote rare diseases that can develop
[00:05:23] in remote places, Africa, in some corners of
[00:05:26] Latin America, where they affect a
[00:05:30] supposedly limited group of
[00:05:34] people, definitely
[00:05:37] it can be said that this industrial
[00:05:41] pharmaceutical industry
[00:05:43] is not interested because in reality, quote-unquote, there is no
[00:05:47] market to make it profitable,
[00:05:51] exactly, but here it is also necessary to mention that
[00:05:55] within, for example, chronic diseases
[00:05:59] or certain critical
[00:06:02] diseases where the business primarily
[00:06:05] lies, we are not only talking about obstacles
[00:06:09] and barriers to accessing medicines
[00:06:12] in an equitable, just, affordable
[00:06:16] way in financial terms, but
[00:06:18] even about barriers to
[00:06:22] prior procedures of what is
[00:06:25] researched, how it is researched, who benefits from certain types
[00:06:29] of research, so
[00:06:33] multinationals are also allocated there
[00:06:36] to what knowledge
[00:06:39] and commercialization processes
[00:06:42] can be generated in certain countries, well, precisely
[00:06:46] the other side of the coin, what these large
[00:06:48] pharmaceutical
[00:06:51] complexes argue
[00:06:54] is that they spend years
[00:06:57] even trying to develop a
[00:07:00] vaccine or a medicine at a
[00:07:03] very high or extremely
[00:07:08] when they put it on sale, they have to start recovering that investment that
[00:07:11] took a long time and a lot of money, and that if in the
[00:07:15] global South they want to produce that
[00:07:19] medicine generically, it is
[00:07:22] absolutely, according to them,
[00:07:25] unfair, because in reality they have done
[00:07:28] absolutely nothing for that medicine or vaccine
[00:07:32] to exist, and they have invested all that
[00:07:35] money, therefore they justify
[00:07:39] that it is extremely expensive or...
[00:07:42] or inaccessible for a large part of the world's
[00:07:45] population. How do you react to that argument? That is
[00:07:49] totally fallacious, because
[00:07:52] really the budget used to produce a vaccine
[00:07:55] is recovered very quickly or even many times those
[00:07:59] research processes have two
[00:08:03] routes: first, they are mostly processes that have been
[00:08:06] financed by state governments
[00:08:09] and on the other hand, they tend
[00:08:12] to be research and development processes for vaccines that tend
[00:08:16] to be very economical. Let's talk, for example, about the case of the
[00:08:20] COVID-19 vaccine. The COVID-19 vaccine, first
[00:08:24] it was a process of a technological
[00:08:27] development process that was extremely
[00:08:31] economical, for one dollar or less than one dollar per
[00:08:34] vaccine, but the price that was being charged to each
[00:08:37] country for a vaccine was
[00:08:42] a vaccine really cost, and on the other
[00:08:46] hand, we also have
[00:08:49] the World Health Organization where
[00:08:52] it has precisely tried
[00:08:55] to regulate access to certain patents that
[00:08:59] are of public health interest and that therefore
[00:09:01] should first have their
[00:09:04] budget lowered and second
[00:09:07] have their access facilitated
[00:09:10] in a legal and normative way so
[00:09:13] that the country can produce this
[00:09:17] vaccine. So it is not so true that the
[00:09:20] high costs of vaccines occur because they
[00:09:23] have a pharmaceutical industry, the large pharmaceutical industry has
[00:09:27] to recover the value of the research
[00:09:31] process and technological
[00:09:34] the COVID vaccine and it is the
[00:09:38] case that many analysts point
[00:09:42] out that it is clearly a political
[00:09:44] issue, that is, politics
[00:09:48] that we have the issue that
[00:09:52] Cubans during the pandemic
[00:09:56] developed a vaccine against
[00:09:59] COVID, but they could not present
[00:10:02] it to the World Health Organization
[00:10:05] because the main, let's say,
[00:10:08] donor was the United States and ultimately
[00:10:12] made its influence felt in that organization and therefore it
[00:10:16] could never reach global approval, meaning
[00:10:19] that politics also plays a role in
[00:10:23] medicines and vaccines. Of course,
[00:10:27] of course, health in general, not
[00:10:30] only in this niche of medicines, but in general, is
[00:10:33] mediated by the way international
[00:10:37] geopolitics behaves,
[00:10:40] which we call, those of us who are in this
[00:10:43] more critical field, health geopolitics, but
[00:10:47] also it is mediated by the power relations
[00:10:51] that exist between the countries that are badly
[00:10:54] called third world countries, over the countries of the
[00:10:57] third world and with those dynamics and those power relations,
[00:11:01] ultimately they also control human life,
[00:11:05] because they are interested in having people, ultimately sick with little
[00:11:08] capacity for criticism and to mobilize before other
[00:11:12] scenarios, it becomes a facade, in short, to
[00:11:15] be able to turn
[00:11:19] people into submissive, this generates controversy
[00:11:23] to say it this way, but ultimately that's how the
[00:11:28] they instrumentalize and objectify people.
[00:11:32] There is a documented case that I bring to your attention,
[00:11:36] but it became public,
[00:11:39] that during precisely the
[00:11:43] COVID pandemic, President Jair Bolsonaro, who was not
[00:11:46] exactly the most leftist of presidents, but
[00:11:50] rather an ultra-rightist, the only vaccine he
[00:11:53] managed to buy first was the Russian
[00:11:56] vaccine. Immediately within
[00:11:59] the United States, the Department of Health communicated
[00:12:03] through a statement to what
[00:12:06] had to do with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to the
[00:12:10] chancellery, that the purchase
[00:12:13] of that vaccine from the Russians by
[00:12:17] Brazil caused Russia
[00:12:20] to gain influence within the life of
[00:12:23] Brazil and within the life of Latin America, therefore,
[00:12:27] listen to this, therefore, it became
[00:12:30] a threat to the national security of the United
[00:12:34] States, that purchase. This means that politics
[00:12:37] is still very much present everywhere, of course,
[00:12:41] it doesn't work that way as they wanted
[00:12:44] to sell it to us during COVID, that some vaccines from countries
[00:12:48] like Russia, like Cuba,
[00:12:51] did have interference in the
[00:12:54] economic and political decisions of certain countries,
[00:12:57] while the vaccines produced in other governments did not. That
[00:13:01] doesn't work that way, but we are ultimately
[00:13:05] talking about a medicalization of
[00:13:08] life where
[00:13:11] precisely medicines are
[00:13:14] used and this whole conception or this
[00:13:18] logic that medicine is the savior is used,
[00:13:21] and individually without considering other
[00:13:25] criteria and other processes that are determinant
[00:13:28] such as the socioeconomic conditions of people.
[00:13:31] So in reality, what we are
[00:13:34] saying here is how with
[00:13:37] medicines, of course, exercises of domination
[00:13:41] are generated over people, but individually and over
[00:13:44] countries since they cannot effectively
[00:13:47] and economically
[00:13:50] access certain
[00:13:53] medicines and health technologies, but it goes much
[00:13:57] further than that, it's not only medicines, it's the relationships
[00:14:01] that are woven behind them, that are
[00:14:04] crossed, the agreements that are generated between countries
[00:14:07] and the actors that are part of that large
[00:14:11] pharmaceutical industry, that is, the lobbying that
[00:14:15] is generated, that is, there is a medical-industrial
[00:14:17] complex, so to speak, that
[00:14:21] goes much further and that deserves a more
[00:14:25] in-depth analysis. Jennifer, I invite you to take a short
[00:14:28] break. We are talking with Jennifer Cardona
[00:14:31] Malaber, directly from
[00:14:34] Colombia. Jennifer is coordinator of the People's
[00:14:38] Health Movement of Colombia. We are talking
[00:14:41] about the pharmaceutical and
[00:14:44] precisely the industrial
[00:14:47] pharmaceutical model. We'll be
[00:14:50] right back.
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[00:16:35] We continue talking with Jennifer,
[00:16:37] directly from Bogotá. Jennifer
[00:16:41] is coordinator of the People's Health Movement
[00:16:44] of Colombia. We are talking about the industrial
[00:16:48] pharmaceutical model and how
[00:16:50] you qualify the situation in Colombia regarding all
[00:16:54] of this. In Colombia it has been very critical
[00:16:57] because during the last
[00:17:00] 4 years we had our first progressive
[00:17:03] government that tried
[00:17:06] to make structural transformations to the
[00:17:09] health system, but precisely the power
[00:17:12] relations, when I talk about power relations, I talk in
[00:17:16] political, economic, social,
[00:17:19] even military terms, that
[00:17:22] intertwine, make those changes impossible
[00:17:25] and those powers of the
[00:17:29] private sector actors who are
[00:17:31] intermediaries, for example, right now in this case, the global
[00:17:35] pharmaceutical industry, the pharmaceutical managers, as we call
[00:17:39] them here, who are outside
[00:17:42] of the institutions, play a whole lobbying
[00:17:46] scenario and other strategies to
[00:17:49] make those changes impossible, and
[00:17:54] electoral moment, what they did was recreate a whole
[00:17:58] crisis around a supposed shortage of
[00:18:01] medicines in order not to deliver the
[00:18:05] medicines that people
[00:18:07] needed, especially those with chronic diseases and
[00:18:10] critical diseases, but sometime later,
[00:18:14] the general public realized that the
[00:18:18] medicines were available and were stored in warehouses
[00:18:21] by those private actors, so there we see how
[00:18:25] medicines are also used to manipulate people
[00:18:28] and create a whole crisis scenario. Is there an
[00:18:32] alternative to this situation of the industrial
[00:18:35] pharmaceutical
[00:18:38] People's Health Movement, we have been
[00:18:41] precisely encouraging a global
[00:18:44] campaign of public pharma
[00:18:48] and health sovereignty that
[00:18:51] seeks to accompany governments,
[00:18:54] mainly different actors, for example,
[00:18:57] universities, researchers, and society
[00:19:00] in general, so that they can enhance their knowledge
[00:19:04] and develop their capabilities in terms of research,
[00:19:07] production, and distribution of health technologies,
[00:19:11] and that from there we can articulate ourselves among the
[00:19:14] countries that have been called the global South
[00:19:18] in order not to depend 100% on the global
[00:19:21] North countries and that large global pharmaceutical industry.
[00:19:25] So with the development of these capabilities, the
[00:19:29] countries of the global South can set their own
[00:19:32] rules, they do not need the authorization of patents
[00:19:35] from
[00:19:37] those actors who dominate this
[00:19:41] scenario, and even recognizing the characteristics
[00:19:44] and particularities of some countries of the global South, for
[00:19:48] example, like Colombia, it would also include a recognition
[00:19:52] of what ancestral medicines are.
[00:19:54] Now, in the case of Colombia, where the
[00:19:58] hegemonic media are in the hands of a very
[00:20:02] minority group, a business, financial,
[00:20:06] commercial group of the large companies, even
[00:20:10] international ones, those groups that
[00:20:13] control the mainstream media in Colombia,
[00:20:16] when you tell us that there is an alternative and you
[00:20:20] just told us how that alternative
[00:20:24] is focused, do they give them a platform
[00:20:28] to expose this or do they continue
[00:20:31] to use the power of the media to maintain
[00:20:35] the status quo? Well, the media... Right now, with the arrival of the
[00:20:38] current government, the media invisibilizes
[00:20:42] a bit all these dynamics,
[00:20:45] let's say, intentionalities that exist
[00:20:49] around strengthening health sovereignty in the
[00:20:52] country. However, on the one hand, we must acknowledge the efforts
[00:20:56] of the previous government to precisely
[00:20:58] ensure that Colombia recovers, because we had
[00:21:02] the capacity to produce vaccines and medicines more than
[00:21:05] 10 years ago, and due to governmental decisions,
[00:21:08] we lost them. But again, different
[00:21:11] proposals and alternatives began to be financed, such
[00:21:15] as the University of Antioquia, which is already producing more than
[00:21:18] four medicines.
[00:21:21] It launched the first batches at the beginning
[00:21:24] of this year, and linked to that,
[00:21:28] we also have more local strategies that, of course, can no
[00:21:32] longer articulate with the institutional, due to the
[00:21:35] government we currently have, but that the community itself
[00:21:39] seeks to surround it and be able
[00:21:42] to take advantage of these alternatives in the face of the
[00:21:46] barriers that exist to access what the
[00:21:49] health system offers. And finally,
[00:21:52] People's Health Movement of Colombia, is it
[00:21:56] difficult to get funds to fight against
[00:21:59] this structure of what is the industrial
[00:22:02] pharmaceutical model? At this moment, yes, at
[00:22:06] this moment it is difficult because of the precisely international
[00:22:09] geopolitical landscape where there is an advance of fascist
[00:22:13] governments
[00:22:16] and on the other hand there is a defunding of
[00:22:20] non-profit organizations,
[00:22:24] other, let's say, other actors of civil
[00:22:27] society who are much broader and who are the ones
[00:22:31] who usually finance these types of initiatives, so
[00:22:34] it is difficult for the measures
[00:22:37] to be invisibilized a bit
[00:22:41] and tied up a bit, but the work continues,
[00:22:44] especially in terms of political advocacy, legislative
[00:22:47] advocacy, and other scenarios. Jennifer Cardona
[00:22:51] Malaber, thank you very much for being with us,
[00:22:54] thank you very much for the invitation.
[00:30:38] Since Donald Trump's return, the White House of the United States has
[00:30:42] turned tariffs into a political pressure
[00:30:46] instrument, a weapon. The measures against Mexico, Canada, China
[00:30:49] and Brazil have opened a new stage of commercial tensions on the
[00:30:53] continent. Canada responded eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth, with tariffs
[00:30:57] on hundreds of American products.