As Canada faces an ongoing scarcity of kids’s drugs, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he doesn’t know if ramping up home manufacturing of prescribed drugs is the best method to addressing the issue.

“I don’t know offhand if it’s the proper factor for Canada to be beginning producing these specific capsules or whether or not it’s only a query of getting extra dependable provide chains and agreements on the market,” Trudeau mentioned final week in an interview with The Canadian Press.

Canada has been experiencing a nationwide scarcity of kids’s ache drugs for months, leaving mother and father scrambling to handle their youngsters’s fever and ache as charges of respiratory syncytial virus and influenza skyrocket.

The drug scarcity has led to some requires Canada to take a position extra in its pharmaceutical manufacturing capacities for important drugs.

Nevertheless, Trudeau mentioned which may not be one of the best use of taxpayer {dollars}.

“If we had a giant orange scarcity in Canada, individuals may be shouting, ‘Okay, we have to make them extra greenhouses so we will develop extra oranges in Canada,”’ the prime minister mentioned.

“That may not be one of the best ways to spend our cash.”

Trudeau mentioned he’s centered on fixing the issue of drug shortages utilizing essentially the most environment friendly method, even when meaning sourcing drugs from different locations on the earth.

The instance Trudeau used for example the distinction between importing and producing domestically was an excessive amount of of an apples-to-oranges comparability for the NDP’s well being critic Don Davies.

“To check oranges to important treatment that folks might have to remain alive … that’s a horrible analogy,” he mentioned.

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Davies mentioned Canada wants a nationwide technique for prescribed drugs that will each promote a robust non-public sector and embody a publicly owned producer. “Will we wish to be susceptible to the vagaries and vulnerabilities of world provide chains and choices made by the non-public sector?”

For drugs which might be briefly provide, the federal authorities has been counting on imports. Well being Canada has introduced in practically 1.9 million bottles of overseas merchandise and “extra is coming,” a spokeswoman mentioned on Tuesday.

She mentioned the federal division is “utilizing all instruments at its disposal to assist alleviate the scarcity” of ache drugs and “proactively working with firms to facilitate the importation of overseas merchandise.”

However pharmacists have warned that the emergency imports is probably not sufficient.

“A lot of the pharmacies are doing buy limits, one amount per individual, holding it behind the counter, telling individuals to purchase solely what they want,” Shelita Dattani, vp of pharmacy affairs for the Neighbourhood Pharmacy Affiliation of Canada, mentioned final month.

Canada’s expertise with the pandemic and vaccine procurement has raised questions on how a lot the nation ought to depend on world provide chains for important items.

Jillian Kohler, a professor on the College of Toronto’s Leslie Dan College of Pharmacy, mentioned governments must be rather more engaged with regards to guaranteeing dependable provides of pharmaceutical merchandise.

She mentioned the scarcity of kids’s ache treatment speaks to the nation’s “very problematic” dependence on sources outdoors Canada’s borders and on the non-public sector.

“We have to consider well being merchandise as well being safety, as one thing that’s a national-security subject,” she mentioned. “And counting on the non-public sector, whether or not it’s home or exterior to Canada, is dangerous.”

Davies mentioned making a public producer of pharmaceutical merchandise wouldn’t be a wholly new concept. The federal authorities used to personal Connaught Laboratories, which developed and produced vaccines in addition to insulin. The laboratory was bought off to the non-public sector within the Nineteen Eighties.

Nevertheless, College of Toronto professor Christopher Rutty mentioned in an electronic mail that the lab was not centered on the event and manufacturing of chemically-derived prescribed drugs corresponding to ache treatment.

Kohler mentioned public manufacturing has not been traditionally seen as an economical method of manufacturing drugs. She mentioned it’s time for a shift in pondering.

“Governments have a accountability for the well being of their populations. And outdated fashions don’t work, as we’ve seen. So we have to rethink: how will we guarantee safety for our inhabitants’s well being wants?”

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