Nick Dearden will be speaking at The Pig on Friday 13 October

Pharmanomics book tour comes to Hastings

The director of Global Justice Now, Nick Dearden, will be in Hastings  this Friday to talk about his new book Pharmanomics: How Big Pharma Destroys Global Health. Gabriel Carlyle reports.

Bexhill & Hastings Global Justice Now (BHGJN) is hosting the event – which will be taking place at 6pm on Friday 13 October at The Pig on Hastings seafront. BHGJN’s Barbara Echlin explains why the group was so keen to host the event:

“Two years ago, whilst we in the UK had been offered two Covid-19 vaccine doses and were starting to hear about a booster campaign, most countries around the world hadn’t got close to vaccinating even their frontline health workers. It was a shocking moment which highlighted the profound inequality and injustice of our world.

“The problem was not simply that Britain hadn’t sold any vaccines, nor that it had failed to donate any vaccines, as bad as that was. There was a deeper problem. We’d effectively put Big Pharma bosses in charge of our vaccine rollout, even though those medicines had been developed with public money. Those bosses were now refusing to share the vaccine know-how with the many countries which would have been capable of producing more.

“In our global economy, corporate profits were shown to be more important than millions of people’s lives, more important than ending a world-changing pandemic as quickly as possible.”

The Executive Director of UNAIDS Winnie Byanyima says that Dearden’s book, which has just been published by radical publisher Verso: ‘brings together detailed investigative research with lessons from the frontlines of the fight for access to medicines. It exposes a global apartheid in which a few mostly white male Pharma bosses make billions while billions of people are left without essential medicines. It exposes how the problem of medical monopolies is not a few rule-breakers but the rules themselves. Most crucially, it shows how the system which put profits over people’s lives was man-made, and how through collective action people can unmake it, for everyone’s health.’

According to Dearden: “The more I looked into it, the more I came to understand why Big Pharma repeatedly put profits before lives. From the spread of HIV in southern Africa, to the opioid crisis in the US, to the failure to invest in desperately needed new antibiotics, the way we make medicines is utterly broken. It’s the economic model of the industry – the ‘pharmanomics’ – that needs changing.”

Signed copies of Pharmanomics will be available at the event from Hastings Book shop, who are supporting the launch.

Nick Dearden’s book launch will be at 6pm at The Pig, 37 White Rock, Hastings TN34 1JL on Friday 13 October. The event is free.

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