Home » Health » The difficult relocation of the pharmaceutical industry

The difficult relocation of the pharmaceutical industry

By Chloé Hecketsweiler and Chloé Aeberhardt

Posted yesterday at 2:31 am, updated yesterday at 5:40 pm

It is March 11, late morning, a few hours before the World Health Organization qualifies as “Pandemic” the Covid-19. At the headquarters of the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP), we are preparing to face the wave, but its magnitude is still largely underestimated. The news coming from Italy is however very dark: in the north of the country, the health system is overwhelmed by the influx of patients in respiratory distress, who require heavy intensive care.

Installed in a meeting room, Rémi Salomon, the president of the medical commission of establishment of the AP-HP, listens with concern to the account of the doctors of the San Raffaele Institute, in Milan, where the confinement was decided the day before. “What they were telling us was terrible”, he remembers. Lack of beds, staff, but also, soon, medicine. That day, we are talking about azithromycin, a current antibiotic, but, very quickly, shortages will threaten several molecules essential for resuscitation of patients: curares, used to relax the muscles before intubation, propofol, a anesthetic and midazolam, a hypnotic.

After Italy, France. As of March 27, the AP-HP released a document encouraging doctors to change their practices to save these molecules. Five days later, the AP-HP and eight other large European university hospitals (CHU) appeal for help to governments: “Hospitals will soon run out of essential drugs to treat Covid-19 patients in intensive care (…). They may not be able to provide adequate intensive care within one to two weeks. ”, they warn.

Trace the drugs at each stage of their manufacture

Problem: the health authorities do not know where to get these drugs. Each year, manufacturers declare their sources of supply to the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products, but, for lack of sufficient resources, these data are not used, which makes it impossible to identify weak links : “On paper, with ten different manufacturers for the same drug, we have an impression of security. But if everyone buys their active ingredient in one place, there is a risk ”, underlines a consultant who prefers to remain anonymous.

Article reserved for our subscribers Read also Coronavirus: what science still ignores at the time of deconfinement

Commissioned in September 2019 by the Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, a report on the industrial causes of drug shortages recommends providing the agency with an information system to track drugs at each stage of their manufacture. In this still confidential document – that The world was able to consult -, the authors insist on the need to “Launch a study on the manufacturers involved in these links, in particular to identify the sites or production lines for which maintenance in France or in Europe is strategic and should be encouraged”.

You have 69.79% of this article to read. The suite is reserved for subscribers.

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.