In a pediatrician's office, a mother is in despair: she went to around ten pharmacies to find, in vain, the antibiotic prescribed five days earlier to treat her baby's ear infection. The doctor decides to prescribe another one, with a broader spectrum of action, even if it means ultimately promoting the resistance of the bacteria. This situation, filmed by journalist Julie Lotz last March, has become commonplace: last winter, nearly 5,000 references for medicines, often essential, were missing, five times more than in 2018.
How to explain this shortage? The magazine “Cash Investigation” is conducting the investigation using the example of amoxicillin, a common antibiotic. Relaying the discourse held by manufacturers for fifty years, pharmacists first blame the prices of medicines in France: they are much lower than in other European countries and laboratories sell their stock to the highest bidder. An argument swept aside by an economist, then by the former Minister of Health Agnès Buzyn.
Waste and economic interests
According to the latter, the global problem comes rather from the lack of anticipation of manufacturers in the face of the demographic explosion and the exponential rise in demand. Moving a little quickly on the relocation strategy carried out by the State to strengthen France's health sovereignty, Julie Lotz points out the inability of the authorities to regulate a just-in-time market and to avoid the overstocking of certain large pharmacies, which contributes to aggravate the phenomenon.
A ludicrous sequence, shot in a French factory, also denounces the waste of thousands of boxes of medicine due to minor packaging defects. The program ends with a spotlight on the struggle of patients with cystic fibrosis, both French and South African, to access treatments, sold at high prices by an American laboratory. Here again, economic interests take precedence, alas! on patient health.
France
