Policy prescriptions

5. Conclusion
The pharmaceutical industry holds the reigns of a vast and
well-resourced lobbying machine in Brussels, enjoying
almost systematic access to European Commission decision-makers.
This breeds serious fears over excessive influence
of big pharma on EU decision-making, to the detriment
of public health and trade justice.
The colossal, multi-million lobbying expenditure from
pharma companies, trade associations, and lobby firms acting
on their behalf, dramatically dwarfs the spending of civil
society public health and access to medicines advocates
by around 15 times. Extensive meetings with policy-makers
– including over 50 meetings with EU pharma trade association
EFPIA in the first four and half months of the Juncker
Commission – and participation in Commission advisory
groups are some of the channels of influence that the pharmaceutical
industry uses to promote its interests.
A major rebalancing of interests is urgently needed, beginning
with full transparency over industry lobbying and influence.
This can can only come through a truly mandatory
EU lobby register, both monitored and sanctioned, as well
as full and automatic disclosure of lobby meetings at all
levels of policy-makers – not only the highest-level, which
leaves transparency around lobby contacts for the bulk of
Commission officials dependent on time-consuming and
often incomplete access to documents requests.
An end to industry representatives sitting on advisory
groups in their “personal capacity” is long overdue, as is a
publicly demonstrated rebalancing of interests in expert
groups. This needs to be accompanied by a shift away from
the regulatory culture that fails to see the profit-motivated
interests of the regulated as being at odds with the public-good
motivated responsibilities of the regulator.
Shining a light on the pharmaceutical lobby’s
firepower, and deconstructing its agenda, is a
crucial step in serving genuine public health
needs, and truly facilitating access to essential
medicines the world over.
as a ‘barrier’ to the same. Meanwhile the capture of EU
research funding through public-private projects like IMI
grows apace. Greater understanding of the reality behind
the rhetoric is urgently needed, as a first step to making
one of the world’s most profitable, most powerful, and most
problematic industries fit to serve the goals of public health.
One of the clearest examples of the political consequences
of the firepower of the pharmaceutical lobby is the way that
secrecy around clinical trials results is being pushed by big
pharma’s lobbying on TTIP. Citing “commercial confidentiality”
it is effectively denying patients, doctors, and researchers
access to unbiased information about the safety and
efficacy parameters of a drug, based on both the results and
the methodologies of its testing.
Shining a light on the pharmaceutical lobby’s firepower,
and deconstructing its agenda, is a crucial step in serving
genuine public health needs, and truly facilitating access to
essential medicines the world over.
There has been an effective capture of the narrative around
medicine and health policies by the pharmaceutical industry
agenda, which makes its role and legitimacy unassailable
in the minds of many. Thus the pharmaceutical industry’s
rhetoric can often win over both the public and policy makers
with language about property rights fuelling ‘innovation’
and ‘research’, while framing regulation of the sector
Policy prescriptions Conclusion 33