The lights on Big Pharma have just gone out, lit by the Friday article in Repubblica two weeks ago, that another thread has already opened up on the misdeeds of some pharmaceutical companies.
Whenever the judiciary, law enforcement or journalists investigate the world of healthcare and the pharmaceutical sector, some "beautiful" ones come out.
The fil rouge is always the same, some crafty people in the sector study some tricks to get to the swag formed by the money for health care and until they are discovered they steal at full blast.
Yet as if by magic the pharmaceutical industry always comes out clean, AIFA and the Ministry of Health with a very questionable attitude do not intervene on what is happening, letting what comes to the surface during journalistic or non-journal investigations fall into oblivion.
So far no pharmaceutical company has had to suffer anything, indeed the most talked about companies continue as usual in their daily work.
No drug has ever been removed from the NHS, quite the contrary. The price of the drugs is kept as it is even in evidence of non-crystalline situations or rather fraudulent situations. Only the ISF pay a heavy price on what is happening. In the first place with image damage, being in contact with people who look ever more carefully at our category, wrongly suspected of being the triggering cause of what is happening and practically because the job cuts concern only us and not "the companies” who are actually responsible for certain policies.
As long as our category will continue to be interested only in its small backyard, disregarding what happens in general and in its colleague, it will be child's play for pharmaceutical companies to reign over those who work in our sector.
Yet it doesn't take long to get some results. We just need to increase the weight and representativeness of those associative and trade union structures that really deal with our problems, abandoning old clichés and beliefs that no longer have a reason to exist.
However, it will be the proverbial laziness of informants or the great disruptive capabilities of pharmaceutical companies, the fact is that our category in a topical moment like this is struggling to find itself, only a few rare cases of "resistance", for the rest the category remains prone and not gives signs of annoyance or reaction.
Leander Clean
04.05.2010
