Janice Schakowsky: “I am proud to support the Waters-Kucinich amendment and urge its passage. Just imagine for a minute if the United States…”

“I am proud to support the Waters-Kucinich amendment and urge its passage. Just imagine for a minute if the United States Government decided it could provide generic anti-retroviral drugs for the treatment of HIV/ AIDS to all those who are infected at minimal or no cost, and as a result we saw AIDS deaths plummet in the United States. Now imagine if another nation challenged the United States on the grounds that we were violating the intellectual property rights of a pharmaceutical company and that that other government went hand in hand with the pharmaceutical company to the WTO and challenged the right of the United States to take care of its citizens. I am sure that if that happened, that Members would be flocking to the House floor protesting the action and calling on the United States to simply ignore the WTO and continue this lifesaving program. It was 1999 when I found out that, in fact, it was the United States, hand in hand with the pharmaceutical companies, going to the WTO and telling South Africa it could not save its own citizens, that it continued to do that in Thailand, and that it continued to do that in Brazil. How shocking it would be for us if the tables were turned. Intellectual property rights here, the rights of human beings to live down here.”