for the Atlantic, you traced some of the shortages to an Indian drug manufacturer named Intas Pharmaceuticals. What happened?Intas Pharmaceuticals manufactures many kinds of generic drugs, including cancer drugs, that are then supplied to the U.S. Last November, the FDA conducted an inspection of Intas’ plant in India, and it found just farcical conditions.
It seems almost unfathomable that major hospital systems and purchasers wouldn’t have a sense of the durability of the market. Why is that? I think it is completely unfathomable. We’re not even talking about the high-end, state-of-the-art, super expensive new drugs that patients might struggle to access. These are the basic, vanilla, front-line drugs that have been around for decades, and should be the most accessible.Let me give you an example of how little we know about these markets. There’s a drug called fludarabine that is currently in shortage.
Often, people point the finger at the FDA because they are a regulatory body, they approve medicines, and so on. But the FDA isn’t really an economics agency, and this is fundamentally an economics problem. One simple way of summarizing everything I just told you is that the problem is the inability of the market to observe or reward quality. That is beyond the scope of the FDA.