EDITORIAL: The government’s disregard for the pharmaceutical sector crisis that is upon us, even though it took a long time in the making, is simply unforgivable.

It turns out that a number of factors, all owing to sheer negligence on the part of the people running this country, have combined to create a situation where import of necessary medicines as well as medical equipment is not just no longer possible, any attempts to do so would break the country’s laws.

First the government refused to entertain the pharma sector’s pleas regarding increasing prices on the shelf because input costs in the international market had risen too much too soon for them to continue with business as usual. It is now clear that in making what seemed like a politically correct decision it made the wrong choice between cheap medicines that are not available and expensive medicines that are readily available.

Then the foreign exchange crisis made some banks violate SBP (State Bank of Pakistan) directives to entertain the pharma sector on priority basis by picking and choosing which sectors or companies would be allowed to open letters of credit (LCs) for imports.

And then the government made it mandatory to register with the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (Drap) for import of medical and surgical equipment when the said authority had neither the competence nor the manpower to absorb the workflow.

“Drap has not been able to make decision on most of the registration applications submitted over the past several years and so far, only about 3,000 applications have been dealt with, while the number of medical items used in Pakistan is more than 300,000,” the Healthcare Devices Association (HAD) lamented as the extended deadline for registration through SRO 526 ended with the last year, making all unregistered medical devices and tests illegal. And already “discontinuation of medical facilities and life-saving surgeries has started in Pakistan,” it chillingly added.

Since about “90 percent of medical devices used in Pakistan’s hospitals are imported”, we are looking at a crisis of colossal proportions. And, worse still, it might already be too late to avert it. All this begs some very serious questions that the government will have to answer.

How could it, for example, just look on even as medicine importers were not allowed to open LCs for their products? And even though registration of all imports with relevant authorities is a step in the right direction, whatever gave the government the idea that the small window it was offering was enough to get the job done? And, most importantly, why didn’t it revise its timetable when things were getting delayed clearly because of its own inefficiencies?

Now what’s to be done when one of the most thickly populated countries in the world, with one of the most abysmal poverty trends, will be without basic medicines as well as life-saving drugs and hospitals will no longer conduct simple or complex tests for most people in need? No doubt one of the main reasons is that all political parties are currently engulfed in a nonsensical feud about grabbing or hanging on to power, and have no qualms about dragging the whole country through the mud for it.

But now they have gone too far and triggered what stakeholders are calling a “severe humanitarian crisis”. It is because of them, and their over-indulgence in petty politics, that a nuclear power is on the brink of not being able to treat its own sick people; which it unfortunately has in abundance.

Surely, this situation calls for the whole government machinery to push everything else down the priority list and solve this crisis immediately.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2023