Vital drugs are either not authorized or are deemed too expensive, as cases rise.
Rates of tuberculosis are on the rise in Europe, but countries are ill-equipped and lack access to the latest drugs targeting the worst strains.
Some patients are spending a year and a half in hospital isolation receiving old medicines instead of just six months of treatment at home, because countries do not have access to the most up-to-date therapies to cure people of the infectious disease.
In some EU countries, the latest medicines are either not authorized or are deemed too expensive to use. To effectively treat patients, the NGO Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF) has stepped in to help in Poland and Slovakia.
Earlier this year, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (EDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that Europe was stalling in its quest to suppress tuberculosis and could miss its 2030 targets to end the disease. The agencies caution that if Europe doesn’t get a grip on the rising rates of infection with the recommended cocktail of drugs, the gains made over the last decade could be lost.
I believe if you have the means to save someone and willfully withhold it, you’re culpable for murder.
Pharmaceutical companies aren’t going bankrupt if they can’t charge thousands of dollars for a single dose. Common medications that are manufactured and sold in bulk subsidize the cost of medicines for rare conditions. They also enjoy patent benefits other industries don’t get specifically to recouperate R&D costs.
Governments also can and do negotiate for lower drug costs, which is why medication is cheaper in Canada than the US.
Oh, and don’t forget all the public funding pharmaceutical companies already get. Governments dumped tons of money into developing the covid vaccines and the companies made insane profits off of it.