David Menkes, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau
Growing evidence shows industry payments to doctors play a key role in unethical pharmaceutical marketing. New Zealand’s disclosure scheme fails to capture all companies and payment types.
Horseshoe crabs in spawning season at Reeds Beach, N.J., on June 13, 2023.
AP Photo/Matt Rourke
Horseshoe crabs play a unique role in medicine, but they’re also ecologically important in their home waters along the Atlantic coast. Can regulators balance the needs of humans and nature?
Canada’s long-promised yet undelivered pharmacare program may be entering the most crucial phase in its history.
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A national procurement program for essential medicines could provide a principled, evidence-based solution to the current challenges facing a national pharmacare program in Canada.
Under a pharmacare plan, a single bargaining agent negotiates for lower prices from drug companies.
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Pharmaceutical and insurance industries that could lose profit through lower drug prices are not happy that a pharmacare bill is planned for fall. They are speaking out and mobilizing their allies.
Health Canada’s new drug licensing proposal contains no mechanism for making fast-tracked medicines affordable.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz
The federal government’s proposed Agile Licensing drug approval regulations mean Canada will have less information about the risks of new medicines, and higher costs.
People for millennia have used what grows around them as medicine.
LorenzoT81/iStock via Getty Images Plus
Some commercial products and practices are directly linked to avoidable ill health, planetary damage, and social and health inequity. Large transnational corporations are especially to blame.
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.’
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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.
Lecanemab is an antibody that attaches to beta-amyloid proteins accumulated in the brain and allows the immune system to get rid of them.
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An 18-month treatment with lecanemab slows functional and cognitive loss by 27 per cent in people with mild Alzheimer’s disease. But this is only the first step towards a real cure.
Global Justice campaigners in London stand by fake coffins to highlight global COVID-19 deaths. If pharma companies waived intellectual property rights, it would be easier for low- and middle-income countries to access COVID-19 vaccines.
(AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
Ronald Labonte, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa
Waiving patent rights on COVID-19 vaccines and drugs is still crucial to ensure access globally, but the waiver on the table at the June World Trade Organization meeting doesn’t do the job.
Changes to the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board regulations, which are intended to help lower drug costs in Canada, were originally scheduled to take effect in July 2020.
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Changes to Canada’s Patented Medicine Prices Review Board regulations have been postponed for a fourth time in two years as Canadians continue to pay some of the highest drug prices in the world.
The level of evidence for withdrawing a drug does not appear to affect the pharma company’s response.
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When drugs are taken off the market because they are either unsafe or don’t work, do pharma companies admit that there are problems? Or do they deny the evidence?
Bacteria that are resistant to every available antibiotic in the U.S. already exist.
Rodolfo Parulan Jr/Moment via Getty Images
The COVID pandemic is giving drug companies an opportunity to reset their image. So how did they get so big and their credibility sink so low?
The first Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine dose in Canada sits ready for use at The Michener Institute in Toronto in mid-December 2020, less than a year from when the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn
If Big Pharma wants to achieve the ultimate image makeover, it must capitalize on the current public good will about its COVID-19 vaccines by prioritizing socially responsible practices.
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
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.
Waiver talks might convince companies to focus on technology transfer and training, and let go of the plan to maximise patent-based revenues.
Anita Anand, Canada’s minister of public services and procurement, opens a box with some of the first 500,000 of the two million AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine doses that Canada secured last March through a deal with the Serum Institute of India.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Carlos Osorio - POOL
Despite some public virtue signalling, the Canadian government is not doing all it can to improve global access to COVID-19 vaccines. Canada has yet to announce its position on the WTO patent waiver.
Associate Professor in the SAMRC Centre for Health Economics and Decision Science - PRICELESS SA (Priority Cost Effective Lessons in Systems Strengthening South Africa), University of the Witwatersrand