Press Release: Medicines Control Council threatens lawsuit to silence charge that its members are ‘directly or indirectly
on the payroll’ of the pharmaceutical industry.
Cape Town: Monday, 18 October 2004 -
On Thursday, 14 October 2004, the South African Medicines Control Council (MCC) tried to prevent the Mail & Guardian newspaper from republishing a claim that its members are directly or indirectly dependent on the pharmaceutical investment industry. This accusation was made in a signature campaign call by the Dr. Rath Health Foundation under the title: ‘Break the Chains of Pharmaceutical Colonialism.’
Both the newspaper and the foundation were unimpressed by the MCC’s lawyers’ attempt to silence us. The Mail & Guardian again published the complete uncensored text of our call for free access to natural and traditional health therapies in South Africa in this week’s edition, and it was followed shortly afterwards by the Sowetan, City Press, and Ilanga.
The background to our signature campaign is an unprecedented attack by the MCC on natural health therapies and traditional medicines in South Africa. The motivation behind this attempt to outlaw natural health is the trillion-dollar pharmaceutical investment business’s attempt to eliminate all competition posed to its market by safe, effective and affordable natural therapies.
The bogus justification advanced by the MCC for this proposed legislation is consumer safety. But the fallacy of this is revealed by the fact that while no one has ever died from safe natural therapies, the deadly side effects of pharmaceutical drugs kill more than a million people every year.
Any litigation brought against us by the MCC in an attempt to block the truth will backfire. At trial, the MCC will finally have to disclose its secret membership lists and the identities of all its ‘external experts … from … medical and pharmacy schools’ (per MCC website), who make its decisions. They will be cross-examined in open court on their past and present financial ties to the pharmaceutical cartel – the scandalous rule rather than the exception worldwide.
As the deadly side effects of Vioxx and other pharmaceutical drugs come to light, more and more people are seeking answers in effective and affordable natural health therapies. The MCC’s attempt to outlaw natural health in South Africa on behalf of the pharmaceutical cartel is a last desperate bid to shore up the cartel’s collapsing monopoly on world health based on patented synthetic dugs.
The MCC is the pharmaceutical cartel’s Trojan Horse within the South African health service. Whereas the South African government has advocated natural health in its national health policies and at the international level within Codex Alimentarius – where it has taken the lead in promoting natural therapies rather than restricting them – the MCC is currently seeking to ban public access to life-saving natural therapies, in conflict with the government’s position.
The Dr. Rath Health Foundation Africa fully supports the South African government.
The people of South Africa will not tolerate the MCC’s attack on their right to natural health and its attempt to sabotage their government’s enlightened position on natural therapies.
POSTSCRIPT: At 15h22 on Friday, the MCC’s lawyers sent us a similar demand that we ‘cease and desist from publishing’ our call for health freedom in South Africa, that we publicly apologize for it, ‘retracting the article in its entirety’, and that we remove from our ‘website any reference to the article or any associated remarks, hyperlinks or technical information relating to’ the MCC. We declined to do so.
For more information contact Anthony Brink at 021 4412000, or email info.za@dr-rath-foundation.org. Our campaign call can be read at www.dr-rath-foundation.org.za. |
