I was one of 500 people who benefited from the £18.7m government funding for Sofosbuvir (NHS delays $1,000-a-pill drug to treat hepatitis C, 16 January). If I hadn’t been treated I would be dead today. The decision of Nice to allow NHS England to postpone Sofosbuvir’s introduction will condemn many patients to death.
There is an alternative, as India has demonstrated, which is to refuse the manufacturers, Gilead Sciences, a patent. In India Gilead has now agreed to the production of a generic version of the drug. The cost of producing Sofosbuvir for a three-month course is $101 – $1 a pill.
The government balks at the potential billion-pound cost of the drug but the answer is simple – produce a generic version of Sofosbuvir. The right of Gilead to charge whatever the market can bear will come at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. In the United States hepatitis C is a bigger killer than HIV, and in Britain there are an estimated quarter of a million sufferers.
The new generation of non-interferon drugs promise to wipe out hepatitis C completely but the major drug companies must be brought under public ownership. Private profit and public health are diametrically opposed. The question is which is more important – the profits of the major drug companies or the needs of those who are ill? Capitalist versus a socialist morality.
Tony Greenstein
Brighton
