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.
Drug development takes a great deal of time, money and effort. While future profits play a big factor in which diseases gets prioritized, advocacy and research incentives can also tilt the scale.
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.
The US PEPFAR initiative has brought HIV medication to millions of people globally. Behind this progress are the activists that pressured politicians and companies to put patients over patents.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
Previously secret documents and data make it clear that many companies engaged in the distribution of prescription painkillers either skirted or ignored their legal obligations for years.
The interests of pharmaceutical companies and public health are not the same. Industry dollars can distort research agendas, while framing health challenges and solutions in ways that benefit corporations.
It takes about three years for safety problems to be identified in new drugs, newer drugs are almost always more expensive, and yet Canadian doctors still hand out hundreds of thousands of samples.
Medical Director, Genea Fertility Melbourne; Clinical Associate Professor, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry & Health Sciences, The University of Melbourne