From “Pirates” to “Heroes”

Abstract

In the mid-1990s, a transnational civil society campaign emerged to challenge Big Pharma over HIV/AIDS medicines patent protection. In 2001, the dispute crystallized into a dramatic media event as pharmaceutical companies sued the South African government over medicine patent laws. The South African lawsuit has been described as a “public relations disaster” for Big Pharma, and a turning point in HIV/AIDS medicines and intellectual property rights discourse. This article assesses these claims in relation to a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of 1,000 articles from U.S., U.K., and South African press outlets from 1997 to 2003. The study finds that a key discourse change to occur over this period was the elevation of generic HIV/AIDS medicines from an excluded criminal threat to a respected legitimate option. Given subsequent policy developments considerably increasing access to generic HIV/AIDS medicines in majority world countries, this article argues that the news media discourse change was a key transformative moment in addressing the global HIV/AIDS epidemic. The study also notes, however, that an antigeneric discourse persisted throughout the coverage, signifying the ongoing contestation of medicine patent protection that continues to characterize global HIV/AIDS medicines access.