BEGALA AWARD

The winner this week is one Richard Stern, head of the Agua Buena Human Rights Association, for equating the production of life-saving drugs with mass murder. It’s from a letter to the president of the University of Minnesota: “I have recently been informed that the University of Minnesota is the patent holder on compounds used to produce the drug abacavir. The outrageously high prices of anti-retroviral medications is a reality which we in Central America assumed was the result of policies of multi-national pharmaceutical companies. Now, students at the University of Minnesota have informed us, that the University is also profiting from the prices of these medications. It is shocking to me personally that a University would be involved in this situation, which is really of genocidal proportions.”