SAWT BEIRUT INTERNATIONAL

| 29 March 2024, Friday |

Sukkarieh: Drug importers’ greed bears the responsibility

Head of the “Academic Health Meeting” and the National Health Authority “Health is a Right and Dignity” Dr. Ismail Sukkarieh, considered in a statement today, that “pharmaceutical policy is still managed and practiced far from its science and humanity origins, in favor of a conflict of interests, accounts and numbers between the concerned parties, for nine months now.”

He said: “The caretaker government, represented by the Ministry of Health, did not take advantage of the time to adopt a basic list of medicine with its scientific symbols, and in cooperation with an independent scientific committee, as it also did not work on activating the central laboratory for control, which does justice to everyone, and puts an end to politicization, so urgent decisions were made for emergency import, resorting to Adventure and Gambling.

As for the importers’ cartel, they bear the primary responsibility for the shortage and price frenzy that the drug market has reached, due to their unlimited greed and the sanctity of their profits, which, despite their billion-dollar fiction, have not refrained from emptying the market of many subsidized medicines for export it outside Lebanon, with the aim of gaining more dollars, and are still demanding the Central Bank of paying the subsidies for these medicines on the rate of 24 thousands.

He concluded: “This immorality paved the way,  and formed the main entrance to the ministerial decision on emergency import, which we fear will turn into a word of right with bad intentions, while the citizen lives the biggest shock of drug’s shortage, that in case it was found, it won’t be affordable