This is one of the fallout from the Covid-19 crisis: faced with increasingly significant supply difficulties, “more than 3,000 drugs are in shortage”, alerted this Friday, May 12, the president of the senatorial commission of inquiry on the subject, Sonia de La Provôté.
Antibiotics, paracetamol, antiepileptics, anticancer drugs… more and more drugs are running out of pharmacies, in France as elsewhere in Europe, arousing the concern of a certain number of players who consider a European response to this issue.
As the government prepares to launch a fight plan by repatriating industrial production to France, Sonia de La Provôté, senator and president of the commission of inquiry into the shortage of drugs, alerted this Friday, May 12 to microphone from franceinfo: “just over 3,000 drugs are in short supply, not counting those that are under pressure”.
According to the senator, this lack concerns all sectors, “from pediatrics to antibiotics”, and has the repercussion of “a domino effect”. “We have substituted other antibiotics as we go along and it is the whole chain of antibiotics in the end, in all therapeutic classes, which is currently in short supply”, she was alarmed. Consequence: even “cancer drugs and antiepileptics” are missing from the shelves.
37% of French people concerned in 2023
According to a study by the France Assos Santé observatory, 37% of French people were faced with a shortage in 2023, compared to only 25% in 2018. And among them, 45% had to modify their treatment or to renouncer.
Faced with this observation, the Minister of Health François Braun called for a European response this Wednesday, May 10. “At some point, you have to have a French policy of sovereignty (…), but also a European policy”, judged the minister at the microphone of CNews.
François Braun also called for “more transparency required of pharmaceutical laboratories on their production, European solidarity when someone has stocks and can help those who do not have them, and the development of a European list of these drugs essential, so that we can guarantee their production for us in France, but also in Europe”.