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Articles on Pharmaceutical companies

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Patients need to know that treatments are recommended based on patient need, not pharma company interests. That’s why it’s important to know how much Big Pharma is paying to health-care providers and organizations. (Shutterstock)

Canadians need to know how much money Big Pharma gives health-care providers, but this information is far too difficult to find

Canada has a lack of transparency about Big Pharma’s payments to health-care providers and organizations. Disclosure is voluntary, and there’s no central data on even the few companies that do report.
The pharma industry warned that if proposed new prescription price guidelines go ahead, drug launches would be delayed and ‘Canadian patients will be deprived of potentially life-saving new medicines.’ (Shutterstock)

How the pharmaceutical industry uses disinformation to undermine drug price reform

The pharma industry claims lower prescription drug prices will mean less access to new medication for Canadians. It’s an old threat that pits profits against patients’ rights to affordable drugs.
Drug patents don’t necessarily spur companies to innovate so much as restrict access to their IP. Andrii Zastrozhnov/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Pharma’s expensive gaming of the drug patent system is successfully countered by the Medicines Patent Pool, which increases global access and rewards innovation

The Medicines Patent Pool was created to promote public health, facilitating generic licensing for patented drugs that treat diseases predominantly affecting low- and middle-income countries.
Generic drug names are assigned at the global level by the World Health Organization in conjunction with national naming authorities. (Shutterstock)

Generic drug names provide information for doctors, so why is Health Canada promoting the use of pharma brand names?

Generic drug names are often long, but they can tell doctors what type of medicine it is and how it works. But it’s brand names that appear first and most prominently in Health Canada materials.
Though drug recalls are relatively uncommon in the U.S., reduced inspections increase the likelihood of manufacturing errors that slip through the cracks. AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool

The FDA’s weak drug manufacturing oversight is a potentially deadly problem

COVID-19 has exacerbated a backlog of domestic and foreign drug manufacturing inspections that the FDA is still too short-staffed to adequately deal with.

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