The Senate has released its report on drug shortages in France. After five months of investigation and more than fifty hearings of health actors, the senators draw up an “alarming” observation.
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The shortages are getting worse and the government is not up to the task of dealing with them. The results of the Senate inquiry committee sign “bankruptcy” drug policy in France, concludes Laurence Cohen, the senator and rapporteur of the commission. After conducting dozens of hearings and obtaining, not without difficulty, answers on the functioning and dysfunctions of the supply chain, she paints a critical portrait. We have thus gone from 700 reports of stockouts in 2018 to more than 3,700 last winter. An unprecedented peak which proves that the authorities, like the manufacturers who produce just in time, were unable to anticipate the triple epidemic Covid, flu and bronchiolitis.
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The first cause of these shortages is that we no longer produce enough on French territory. Most of the active ingredients are produced in Asia, with increased use of subcontracting. Above all, drugs are considered commodities. We produce those that pay off, innovative drugs, and we leave the others behind. This explains why the shortages mainly concern so-called mature drugs, those which are not sold at very high prices, such as amoxicillin or paracetamol, and which are therefore not very profitable for laboratories. Finally, the last reason is the absence of a pilot on the plane to anticipate shortages or manage them when they arise.
Create a General Secretariat for Medicines
The Senate report puts forward 36 lines of thought to remedy the problem: establish a list of essential drugs. Relocate production to Europe, with regulated prices and uniform labeling standards to avoid competition and facilitate supply from one country to another; control the stocks of manufacturers in the event of a breach, be able to impose sufficiently dissuasive sanctions for big pharma and, above all, create a general secretariat for medicines. It is time, says the report, to deal with this issue politically and transparently.