Big pharma is failing to do enough for poor countries

Gonzalo Viña covers the 2016 Access to Medicine Index for the Financial Times. He focuses on the companies ranked in the lower half of the Index, and cites the finding that the industry as a pack is making little progress in key areas, particularly in affordability.

Some of the world’s biggest drug companies are failing to do enough to provide medicines to poor countries, and the industry as a whole has made almost no progress in making treatments more affordable, the latest Access to Medicine Index has revealed.

Switzerland’s Roche, Bayer of Germany and Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Eli Lilly of the US were among eight companies identified by the Netherlands-based Access to Medicine Foundation that are falling short on a range of measures such as research and development, patent and licensing arrangements and product donations.

The ranking, published every two years by the foundation, is sponsored by the British and Dutch governments alongside the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and looks at how the world’s top 20 drug companies operate in low- and middle-income countries.