Thomas Owen

From “Pirates” to “Heroes”: News, Discourse Change, and the Contested Legitimacy of Generic HIV/AIDS Medicines

In the mid-1990s, a transnational civil society campaign emerged to challenge Big Pharma over HIV/AIDS medicines patent protection. In 2001, the dispute crystallized into a dramatic media event as pharmaceutical companies sued the South African government over medicine patent laws. The South African lawsuit has been described as a “public relations disaster” for Big Pharma, and a turning point in HIV/AIDS medicines and intellectual property rights discourse. This article assesses these claims in relation to a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of 1,000 articles from U.S., U.K., and South African press outlets from 1997 to 2003. The study finds that a key discourse change to occur over this period was the elevation of generic HIV/AIDS medicines from an excluded criminal threat to a respected legitimate option. Given subsequent policy developments considerably increasing access to generic HIV/AIDS medicines in majority world countries, this article argues that the news media discourse change was a key transformative moment in addressing the global HIV/AIDS epidemic. The study also notes, however, that an antigeneric discourse persisted throughout the coverage, signifying the ongoing contestation of medicine patent protection that continues to characterize global HIV/AIDS medicines access.

THE ‘ACCESS TO MEDICINES’ CAMPAIGN VS. BIG PHARMA

This paper deploys Laclau and Mouffes discourse theory to examine the dispute over intellectual property protection and global HIV/AIDS medicines access. Over the 1980s and 1990s, major pharmaceutical companies and minority world governments successfully crafted a strong patent protection regime, institutionalized in the World Trade Organizations intellectual property rules. In the early 2000s, a transnational civil society campaign challenged this regime, positioning patents at the centre of a highly publicized dispute. This dispute has been retrospectively identified as a turning point in medicines access discourse, with the 2001–2003 period dubbed the ‘golden window’ for expanded global HIV/AIDS medicines access. However, this ‘window’ has also been critiqued as an unsustainable aberration to a continuing hegemonic regime that prioritizes patent protection, to the detriment of equitable global medicines access. This paper draws on both political economy analyses and discourse theoretical concepts to examine the processes of rupture and suture in HIV/AIDS medicines access discourse.

Twenty one years of HIV/AIDS medicines in the newspaper: patents, protest, and philanthropy

In 1996, highly active antiretrovirals (ARVs) were released to the public, radically altering the health prospects of people living with HIV and AIDS. In the two decades since, ARVs have become the subject of intense political debate and social justice mobilization. In particular, ARV intellectual property patent protections have become a high-profile trade and diplomacy issue, while major philanthropic organizations have entered the fray to support large-scale treatment programs. This article maps 21 years of HIV/AIDS medicines coverage in mainstream newspapers to illustrate these developments and contestations. It demonstrates two main processes: first, where civil society mobilization successfully promoted ARVs onto the media and policy agenda, and second, where issue fragmentation and a changing political and media context saw ARVs dramatically exit the news coverage, despite the continuing catastrophic scale of the global HIV/AIDS medicines crisis.