“They have been sick for two weeks. I have done fourteen pharmacies. "Impossible to find any"
, laments a young mother at the opening of Medicines, the great shortage, broadcast this evening on France 5 in Marina Carrère d'Encausse's hut, "Health Survey".
From paracetamol to broad-spectrum antibiotics, including very specific products, such as growth hormones, and even certain treatments against serious pathologies, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, epilepsy or cancer, nearly 4 000 drugs are currently out of stock or about to be out of stock, whereas there were only a few dozen missing twenty years ago.
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The observation is overwhelming.
It is due as much to the Chinese and Indian monopolies on the manufacturing of the active ingredients necessary for their composition as to the increase in demand, to the systematic abandonment of old formulas, although effective, deemed too unprofitable.
But also the fragmentation of production chains between continents, the increase in the cost of energy and transport, the obsolescence of certain industrial sites and new environmental challenges.
Without forgetting the colossal markets to be supplied outside the EU.
So many elements at the origin of an increasingly worrying phenomenon.
Read alsoShortage of medicines: sharp increase in reports of stockouts or risks of stockouts in 2023
“Forty years of globalization”
“This dependence on Asia is not specific to pharmacy, it is the result of forty years of globalization
,” explains economist Marie Coris in an interview.
From the 1980s, laboratories turned to countries where the cost of production was the cheapest.
“
Firms have relocated to maintain their margins, especially since pharmacy is a very financialized sector and investors are ready to finance innovation on the condition that they benefit from profitability in the very short term
,” specifies. she said.
How can we stem a trend that would gradually become inevitable?
Are there any solutions?
Read also Plan France 2030: 800 million euros to develop the plane of the future
At the heart of the pandemic, the government expressed its determination to repatriate part of French production, invoking the country's health sovereignty.
Beyond the 200 million euros hastily released in 2020, the France 2030 plan provides for the relocation and increase in manufacturing capacities of around fifty essential medicines in France.
In the meantime, patients are suffering from this shortage.
This is evidenced by Bruno Timsit's investigation.
They are even on the front line.
Just like pharmacists, who struggle to obtain supplies and waste a lot of time fulfilling their customers' prescriptions.
And the doctors, whose primary mission is not to tinker, at the risk of endangering the lives of their patients, but to treat.
“When we postpone an intervention for cancer by several months, due to lack of anesthetics, it’s a big problem
,” notes an AP-HP practitioner.
A commission of inquiry was created on February 1, 2023, just a year ago, with the aim of highlighting the causes of these shortages, proposing concrete measures and analyzing the industry's economic model. of the medicine.
To discuss it, after the documentary, Marina Carrère d'Encausse receives on set Giulia Foïs (journalist), Dr Matthieu Calafiore (general practitioner), Béatrice Clairaz-Mahiou (pharmacist, president of the USPO 92 union) and Magali Léo (coordinator of the collective Action patients).