The industry has always wanted the NHS to pay more for its drugs; now it is pulling research and investment out of Britain
T
his year so far, some of the biggest pharmaceutical corporations in the world have withdrawn about £2bn in proposed investment from the UK. One has even threatened to withhold new medicines from NHS patients. Taken together, it’s hard not to conclude that big pharma is at war with the UK.
Merck has scrapped a £1bn research facility, while AstraZeneca ditched a £450m vaccine lab and is rethinking an expansion of another research unit. Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) has cancelled 34 partnerships with the NHS in the last year, and Eli Lilly, Sanofi and Novartis are all believed to have put investments “on hold”. BMS is also threatening to play hardball with its new schizophrenia drug, saying it is “prepared to make the difficult decision” to “walk away” if the NHS won’t pay the price the corporation wants to charge.
One senior government official told the Financial Times that it appeared the companies were working together, saying that the machine-gun rapidity of the industry’s threats “looks very coordinated”. They labelled the behaviour “sinister”, and said they’d “never seen anything like this before”. (The chief of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry said that such an accusation is “very serious” and “categorically untrue”.) Three NGOs, including the one I work for, have asked the Competition and Markets Authority to investigate this further.
