William Haddad, crusader for generic drugs, dies at 91
NEW YORK — William Haddad, a civic evangelist who helped streamline the sale of cheaper generic drugs to U.S. consumers and pare the price of AIDS treatment globally to a dollar a day, died April 30 at his home in Poughquag, New York, in the Hudson Valley. He was 91.
His daughter Lulie Haddad said the cause was congestive heart failure.
Armed with evidence he had amassed as director of the
New York State Assembly’s Office of Oversight and Analysis, Haddad persuaded the Legislature and Gov. Hugh Carey in 1974 to let doctors prescribe equivalent generic drugs in place of higher-priced brand names.
Taking his campaign nationwide as chairman of what was then called the Generic Pharmaceutical Association, an industry group, and his own drug company, Haddad was instrumental in shepherding landmark legislation in 1984 that removed longstanding legal and regulatory hurdles to the manufacture and sale of generic drugs.
The law, sponsored by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., restored patent protection to encourage pharmaceutical companies to invest in research and development of new products while making it easier for makers of generic drugs to get them approved by federal regulators who had already licensed their brandname equivalents.
In 2001, Haddad worked with Cipla, a drug company in India, to make way for the use of generic AIDS medicines and to reduce the price of lifesaving drug cocktails to $350 a year per patient, from as much as $15,000.
“As a volunteer he worked with Cipla to remove the barriers to the use of generic AIDS medicines,” Dr. Yusuf K. Hamied, chairman of Cipla, wrote in an email. “Between him, myself and Cipla, we jointly pioneered HIV/AIDS relief in Africa in the year 2001, which I genuinely believe saved million of lives over the years.”
Haddad never fulfilled his early ambition to become a nuclear physicist, lost his only campaign for elective office when he failed to unseat New York Rep. Leonard Farbstein, and admitted to being bamboozled by the charisma of John DeLorean, the Pontiac GTO designer whose own car company went bankrupt.
But Haddad left an imprint in almost every other phase of his peripatetic career. As a reporter, he and his colleagues were among the first critics to dent the armor of New York’s omnipotent power broker Robert Moses.
Fresh from working on John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign, he helped launch the Peace Corps with its first director, R. Sargent Shriver. He helped elect Mario Cuomo governor of New York in 1982 with the title of campaign manager, reporting to Cuomo’s son Andrew, now the state’s governor.
William Frederick Haddad was born on July 25, 1928, in Charlotte, North Carolina, to Esther (Nowack) Haddad, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, and Charles Haddad, an Egyptian Jew.