Firas Abiad, the Minister of Public Health, revealed the specifics and goals of the decision regarding the drugs’ platform pre-registration to assist in the provision of drugs in the Lebanese market, provided that they are of excellent quality and available at reasonable and competitive cost.

“The decision is a new step that helps offer medicine to the citizen in fighting the difficulties he faces owing to problems related to subsidies,” Abiad said in a press conference.

“This decision will result in an acceleration of drug registration in Lebanon, given that the Ministry’s registration procedure might take up to two years. Before the drug is released on the market, two essential aspects will be preserved: the drug’s quality and its cost,” Abiad added.

“The emergency import decision is one of the answers,” he said, “but it requires requesting special approvals, whereas the new pre-registration decision allows importers to have a more permanent and solid presence in the local market.”

“The decision includes several sections, the most important of which is the imposition of conditions that guarantee the high quality of the drug and that the factory’s laboratory has a globally recognized GMP, such as the FDA (US Food and Drug Administration), the EMA (European Medicines Agency), or the World Health Organization,” he said.

In terms of pricing, the decision said that the costs of the drugs to be imported would be competitive and acceptable because the objective is not to import any pharmaceutical, but to import high-quality medicine while easing the financial burden on the patient.