The annual supply of a leading antiretroviral drug, Combivir, for one person costs $1,350 in Russia, whereas the lowest price quoted for developing countries last year was $231, HIV patient rights activists said on Thursday.
Activists staged a protest near the Russian office of the British pharmaceutical company ViiV Healthcare in downtown Moscow, demanding that it slash prices for its HIV drugs in half.
The protesters handed over a mock prize, “The Big Spade” stuffed with fake money to ViiV, which said its Russian prices are among the world’s lowest.
“ViiV is making money through our lives,” read a black banner unfurled by the picketers under the watchful eye of police.
The picket was sanctioned for the first time in Patient Control’s two-year history, group representatives said.
Three policemen, one of them plainclothes, were dispatched to oversee the dozen activists and reported the protesters’ slogans to somebody on their cellphones.
The protesters handed over a mock prize, “The Big Spade” stuffed with fake money to ViiV, which said its Russian prices are among the world’s lowest.
No ViiV representative came out to meet the protesters, who had to leave their mock prize at the reception of the office building they were picketing.
Activists said the company suddenly declared a day off. A ViiV spokesman refused to comment on the matter, saying it was internal matters.
Governmental statistics put the number of HIV-positive Russians at 650,000, Sergei Golovin of International Treatment Preparedness Coalition, a HIV patient rights group, said at a press conference following the event.
Of them, some 200,000 need medical treatment, but less than half of them receive it, he said.
The state allotted 12 billion rubles ($370 million) on HIV medication in 2012, but the amount is not enough, largely due to inflated drug prices, Golovin said.
A 2011 report by international humanitarian agency Doctors Without Borders said Combivir could be obtained for as cheap as $231 in developing countries, but did not specify the country. No fresher statistics are available.
All drug makers inflate prices in Russia, but Patient Control singled out ViiV because it is the biggest player, with 35 percent of the market share and some 50,000 people receiving Combivir, Golovin said.
ViiV has already brought down prices for Combivir in Russia 66 percent over the years, the company’s Russian office said in an emailed statement on Thursday.
Only African countries south of the Sahara pay less for the drug than Russia, said the company. Drug makers curbed last year their non-profit programs for middle-income countries, The Guardian reported at the time.
Moreover, ViiV’s prices comply with caps on maximum medication prices imposed by the government, said the company, which is controled by the London-based GlaxoSmithKline.
The Health Ministry, which is undergoing a revamp under a new head, Veronika Skvortsova, was unavailable for comment on Thursday.
“They used to be really unresponsive to the patient community,” Andrei Skvortsov of Patient Control – not a relative of the minister – said about the ministry.
At a protest in 2011, when Patient Control activists chained themselves to a fence outside the ministry, officials were just staring at them from the windows and laughing, he said.