Drug company lobbyist joins Oxfam's cheap drugs campaign

A senior lobbyist in the pharmaceutical industry is leaving his job to help to spearhead the battle for cheaper drugs to be made available in the developing world. David Earnshaw, director of European government affairs for SmithKline Beecham, will next month join Oxfam and lead its campaign on access to medicines.

Oxfam has been at the forefront of the growing confrontation over the costs of drugs to the developing world, especially AIDS and HIV treatment, and Mr Earnshaw is highly critical of the role of the industry he left earlier this year.

“My view on the access to medicines issue is that the industry has been very stupid. Crass stupidity is a good description. They have risked blowing everything they hold so dear—like their intellectual property protection—for what is a very tiny fraction of their revenue,” he told the BMJ. “The developing world market accounts for about 5% of the revenue of the industry. Put together, the market capitalisation of the four largest companies is more than the economy of India.

“I have urged for a couple of years now for the need to think strategically about the issue and try and move to a high volume, low price paradigm, and I think the shock of this week's events in South Africa will now take them in that direction. Instead of going to court in South Africa, if they had invested a little bit in thinking about the problem, we would all have been a little better off.

The approach of business as usual, which was “basically high prices, low volume in the developing world—that is, get medicines to rich people” was clearly immoral, he said. “It is the wrong business strategy. It is out of place in the real world.”

He added, “One of the problems has been that the industry is a remarkably comfortable cocoon, and it does not encourage radical thought.”

He dislikes the description of him as poacher turned gamekeeper, and said that the key to dealing with the issues is for all sides to work together.

“The only way the world is going to make any progress on this is through working together. If I can bring some expertise and ability to Oxfam and NGOs [non-governmental organisations] based on what I have done in the past, that's good, and I believe that more people should move from the corporate sector to NGOs and the other way as well.”