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.
A woman who said she’s a medical worker who works directly with COVID-19 patients is stopped by police outside of the public Rebagliati Hospital in Lima, Peru, in February 2021. She complained that some people getting vaccinated don’t work directly with COVID-19 patients.
(AP Photo/Martin Mejia)
A vaccination queue-jumping scandal in Peru has caused a massive uproar in the South American country. It could also be a wake-up call for all nations.
The average price for an orphan drug is more than $150,000 per year.
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Patients have a stake in the relationship between doctors and pharmaceutical companies, so the CMA’s current review of its guidelines for doctor/pharma interactions is everybody’s business.
It normally takes ten years to produce a vaccine.
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Medical innovation is often accelerated in a time of crisis.
Despite monitoring the same drugs, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States issued the same drug warnings only seven per cent of the time over a 10-year period.
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Toilet paper shortages were bad enough. A shortage of drugs during the COVID-19 pandemic would be worse. A provision in the Canadian government’s relief package aims to prevent that from happening.
The pipeline of pharmaceuticals is easily disrupted.
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Drug shortages occur regularly in the US, even in the best of times. The pharmaceutical supply chain embodies ‘just in time’ shipping and has little built-in redundancy.
Doctors’ prescribing habits are influenced by drug reps and other industry marketing.
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Too often, pharmaceutical companies and device manufacturers exert influence in how their products are tested in the research phase and recommended in the clinic.
The first study to assess the carbon footprint of the pharmaceutical industry finds that it is far from green.
Tax breaks or exemptions for those working in pharmacy, health insurance and pharmaceutical industries could help bolster support for a national pharmacare plan.
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Two community pharmacists suggest a way for improving the palatability of evidence-based universal pharmacare – for those working in health insurance, pharmacy and the pharmaceutical industry.
No longer tangled and pointing in the right direction.
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Fixes for small pieces of massive problems show that overarching crises may be less hopeless than they appear.
Antidepressants bring in almost $17 billion a year for the pharmaceutical industry, and yet science shows their benefit to be small. Natural therapies such as diet, exercise, light therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy are just as effective.
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Pharmaceutical companies focus on small molecules they’ve devised – and can easily patent. But nature’s already come up with many antibacterial compounds that drug designers could use to make medicines.
Health Canada’s intention to increase the fees drug makers pay for the drug approval process threatens to compromise drug safety and the health of the Canadian public.
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Health Canada proposes to increase fees to the pharmaceutical industry for prescription drug approval. This will compromise drug safety and is a risk to the health of the Canadian public.
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