Eleven European and worldwide NGOs have issued a “Call to EU Ministers of Health and CEOs of Abbvie, BMS, Gilead, Janssen and Merck/MSD regarding Universal Access to Curative Hepatitis C Treatment in the EU and Beyond.”
The letter asks governments to “allocate human, technical and financial resources to prevent, diagnose and treat hepatitis C, establishing strategies and actions plans to eliminate the pandemic; [and] to meaningfully involve health professionals, experts, community, patients and people injecting drugs – the most affected group by HCV.” It asks pharmaceutical companies to “engage urgently in meaningful negotiations to ensure universal access to state of the art treatment to everyone living with hepatitis C. This should be done in a way that is sustainable and affordable to different health systems in Europe according to their individual capacity and in consideration of the overall financial constraints that they face.” The letter concludes: “If all bona fides negotiations fail, we believe that, as a last option, countries have the right to use compulsory licences.”
The organizations signing the letter were: AIDS Action Europe, Civil Society Forum on HIV, Correlation Network, European Harm Reduction Network, European AIDS Treatment Group, Eurasian Harm Reduction Network, European Liver Patients Association, International Harm Reduction Association, International Network of People who Use Drugs, and the World Hepatitis Alliance.
