Access to Medicine and COVID-19

Writing for Pharma Times, Jayasree K. Iyer reports on the findings of the 2021 Access to Medicine Index and describes how the COVID-19 has put the pharmaceutical industry and health systems to the test.

Jayasree refers to the positive, albeit limited, progress of the pharmaceutical companies to systematically pair candidate products with access plans, offering a few examples of best practice. Yet, she notes that a large portion of the products already available on the market remain unsupported by access plans.

She then compares the industry's response to the COVID-19 pandemic with the response to other infectious diseases identified as pandemic risks and concludes that the lessons learnt from this can guide the companies to become a catalyst for change in future.

Read the full article here.