Ken Adelman today unveiled his attempt to denounce Thailand’s national health campaign in the form of a new website, the bluntly-named Thailies.com. Thai Lies is a project of USA for Innovation, a “non-profit, non-governmental organization dedicated to educating the general public about the importance of innovation and the role that protection of intellectual property (IP) plays in encouraging American innovation.” Adelman has launched an enormous campaign with the intent of telling the world that American intellectual property is worth more than Thai health.

This is taken from the USA for Innovation website:

The United States is the world s premier source of innovation. This innovation, created through intellectual property rights, has become the most important factor in U.S. growth and prosperity. In a global economy, America s comparative advantage is its intellectual property.

Intellectual property, strictly defined, has accounted for about one-quarter of all business investment over the last decade, and intangibles now account for nearly two-thirds of the market value of large U.S. public companies. U.S. intellectual property today is worth between $5 trillion and $5.5 trillion, equivalent to about 45 percent of the U.S. GDP and greater than the GDP of any other nation in the world.

Protection of intellectual property is a prerequisite to the creation of new treatments that enable people to live longer and healthier lives. Only 1 in 10,000 potential medicines researched by American scientists is approved for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The average cost of developing a drug in today’s marketplace is over $800 million. The U.S. system of patent protection creates the incentives required to attract capital to such costly investments. Moreover, the distribution of lower quality generic and counterfeit medicines poses real dangers to public health.

So, as you can see, it’s all about money and big businesses. Adelman is the saviour of the corporate giant; a kind of streetwise superhero. His campaign against Thailand consists primarily of press releases, written by himself, and an article published on the Washington Times website, again written by himself. He has even taken out a full page advert in the Wall Street Journal.

Thai Lies is a response to the challenge Thailand is posing to big pharmaceutical companies by overriding corporate patents and producing generic versions of certain medicines. The move came in an attempt to force pharmaceutical companies to lower their prices. The corporate businesses who stand to lose out were rattled, but Aids activists welcomed the news.

“To claim ownership over medicine, and deny that medicine to impoverished citizens of poor nations, simply due to their economic status, is a crime against humanity and should be treated as such,” said natural health and consumer advocate Mike Adams in a News Target report.

The Western drugs industry is in a precarious position now, as other middle-income nations may soon follow Thailand’s example (as Brazil has done already). The flipside to Thailand’s actions is that the ability to fund medical research for the future may be hampered. However, Thailand has made it clear that it will not pay excessively for medicine from Western companies in its attempt to provide healthcare for its people.

Back on Thai Lies, and Ken Adelman goes into great depth to outline Thailand’s enormous military spending. It is true that a lot of money in Thailand could be used more beneficially for the nation, but this could be said of many things in many countries. The bottom line is that the pharmaceutical companies are not concerned because Thailand’s elite’s misuse the country’s wealth, they are concerned because they stand to lose out massively.

Each business day, between May 7 – May 18, Adelman will grace the internet with one of ten “lies” told by Thai Health Minister Mongkol na Songkhla, as PR Newswire reported.

Today’s lie was that Thailand is poor. Robert Weissman of the Huffington Post had these interesting words to say on the matter:

To prove that Thailand is not so poor, the website cites economic data showing that the Thai economy is fast growing (which it is).

What the website does not do is provide the single most relevant statistic to determine the country’s relative ability to pay the sky-high prices charged by brand-name drug monopolists: per capita income.

According to the World Bank, Thailand’s per capita income is $2,720 — roughly one-sixteenth U.S. per capita income.

Thailand maintains a public health service that aims to provide universal access to needed medicines. But the government’s healthcare budget faces constraints, and it is unable to provide universal access to important medicines. The government has been very clear that the savings it obtains from generic competition will be used exclusively to provide greater coverage for the medicines it has compulsory licensed.

Adelman is making a strong point that Thailand as a nation is not poor, but he neglects to mention that Thailand is a large country, much larger than just Bangkok. The real twist in this tale comes forth here, again from Weissman:

Why is Ken Adelman working so hard to denounce Thailand’s public health initiatives?

Adelman says he serves as senior counselor at Edelman Public Relations Worldwide.

Among its largest clients, Edelman lists Abbott Laboratories and Merck. Half of the fourteen companies Edelman lists as its largest clients are drug makers. Besides Abbott and Merck, these are AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Pfizer and Schering-Plough.

So, whose side are you on?

Techno’ tags: Bangkok, Thailand, Generic medicine