Pfizer slammed over Third World drug costs

Unlike a number of other multinational drugmakers, Pfizer "has shownlittle flexibility on pricing and patent enforcement in poor countries," says a new report from the international relief charity Oxfam, which is backed by the Treatment Action Campaign, the leading South African HIV/AIDS activist group.

Pfizer "appears to adopt a broadly uniform pricing strategy, and its policy is not to issue licenses to generic manufacturers," says Oxfam, which urges the firm to introduce tiered-pricing systems for its drugs and allow generic copies instead of what it calls Pfizer's "limited" donation programs. It says price cuts and philanthropy are "piecemeal, reversible and frequently conditional," adding that they often bear little relation to the scale of the problem and leave developing countries too reliant on chance and the goodwill of companies.

Pfizer's market value "exceeds the combined national incomes of the 18 countries in sub-Saharan Africa," yet it "leads the industry campaign for global monopolies on life-saving drugs while Africans die from easily-treatable diseases," said Oxfam's regional media coordinator, Mercedes Sayagues, reports Reuters.