New York City Council speaker Corey Johnson has joined in a campaign calling on the federal government to break the patent that Gilead Sciences has for the HIV-prevention drug Truvada (hereandnow)
“In other countries around the world, Truvada costs about $100 a year for a patient. In the United States, it's almost $20,000 a year for the same exact medicine,” Johnson says. “And so the case we're making is that given that American taxpayers and the [National Institutes of Health] have funded this research, the patent should be broken so that more people can get access to it, to prevent anyone from becoming HIV positive.
“I feel like I'm doing this and all the activists are doing this really on the shoulders of all of those that came before us,” Johnson says. “People who are part of ACT UP and Queer Nation, people that shut down the New York Stock Exchange in the 1980s and 1990s and marched and put their lives and bodies on the line at the height of the AIDS epidemic.
"The NIH has the ability to do this. They have never before used their march-in rights, and the march-in rights come from a law passed by Congress called the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, which allows these patents to be broken in certain cases that involve research that resulted from federal funds. Given how broken, I believe, our health care system is nationally, I'm not entirely optimistic, but there is a first time for everything, and I think in this instance, it's important.
"I feel like so much of my ability to run for office and to be speaker of the city council and to do it as an openly gay, openly HIV-positive man is really because of all of the activists that came before me.""It's really kind of crazy because in 2004 as I said when I found out I was HIV positive, I was despondent. I was depressed. I was ashamed.
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