President Andrés Manuel López Obrador attended my column yesterday at his morning conference. He denied that, to try to contain the shortage, his government is buying pirate medicines and presumed that they “bring the authorization of the World Health Organization (WHO)”, as they appear on his list of prequalified medical products.
However, the official WHO document that speaks of this list of medicines clearly states: “The inclusion in this list does not imply any WHO approval of the products or manufacturing sites in question (which is the sole prerogative of the authorities nationals) ”. It is at the beginning of that central document, in the fifth paragraph, in the immediate view of all.
Shortly thereafter, the first subsection of the section “Disclaimer (disclaimer) of the list of WHO prequalified medicinal products” states: “Inclusion in this list does not constitute a support or guarantee of operation by WHO towards any product for a particular purpose, including what has to do with its safety and / or effectiveness ”.
The document is called “General Information. List of WHO prequalified medicinal products ”and can be found at http://bit.ly/37nQmhb as well as at www.carlosloret.com.
More clearly impossible: WHO does not endorse that these medicines serve what they say they are good for. It seems serious to me that the president of Mexico disinforms on such a delicate issue.
Fortunately, in the same column yesterday I anticipated that this was going to be the president’s response, so I warned: “The government will argue that this import opening implies buying medicines endorsed by the World Health Organization, but that is a trick : WHO does not endorse the effectiveness of medicines, but evaluates the health authorities of the countries to ensure that they have the equipment and knowledge that allow them to evaluate the effectiveness of the medicines. That is, one thing is that you have everything to make a good medicine and another that you actually do it. ”
The WHO list is made in the spirit that medicines arrive, even if they are not fully certified, to the poorest corners of the planet, where many people still die from tuberculosis, malaria, and so on. Mexico was accustomed to another standard in the quality of medicines that reach Mexicans, but the government has decided to lower that standard in the event of a shortage emergency created by the federal administration itself in its tripped start.
We were promised that we would have health from a Nordic country. They buy us medicines from an African country.
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