Deposit "Pharmacy"

Pharmaceutical companies are preparing to capitalize on the epidemic

Three years ago, advertisements for various drugs for bird flu appeared in Russian pharmacies. This did not please the chief orderly of the country, Gennady Onishchenko. He claimed a violation of the Criminal Code and warned: "There is no specific universal drug that provides a complete cure for bird flu." Then Onishchenko noted that domestic arbidol helps against this strain of influenza.

Epidemic is the best marketer for pharmaceutical companies. On the side of manufacturers of antiviral drugs, involuntarily, there is a very powerful lobby - government officials from different countries and the World Health Organization (WHO). And now, during the swine flu epidemic, WHO recommends fighting the virus with two drugs: Tamiflu (Swiss Roche) and Relenza (British GlaxoSmithKline). And the national sanitary departments - including the Russian one - supplement this list with "native" medicines. Their sales are skyrocketing.

In 2004, sales of Tamiflu amounted to only $226 million, according to Datamonitor. In 2005, when the bird flu began, global sales of the drug rose to $1.3 billion, and in 2006, at the peak of the panic, reached a maximum of $2.1 billion. Tamiflu was also purchased by the US administration.

Not all of this money went to the Swiss. The fact is that Roche pays a percentage of the sale to the developer of the drug - the company Gilead Sciences. This company is known for the fact that Donald Rumsfeld, now a former US Secretary of Defense, worked in it before his appointment to the George W. Bush administration. He has been on the board of directors of Gilead Sciences since 1988, and has been its chairman since 1997. In 2001, after joining the Bush administration, he stepped down from the company's management but remained a shareholder.

Most likely, pharmacists will also make good money on the swine flu epidemic. According to the DSM Group agency, in April, when the first reports of a new disease appeared, sales of Tamiflu and Relenza in Russian pharmacies increased by 30%. Sales of domestic arbidol also increased by 14% (it is about ten times cheaper than Tamiflu). In many pharmacies, flyers again appeared - now recommending arbidol to escape the new influenza virus.

Arbidol is believed to have been developed by the Russian chemist Robert Glushkov. At first, it was produced at the Moscow Chemical-Pharmaceutical Production Association named after V.I. Semashko, and things went neither shaky nor rolls - few people knew about the drug. But then the chemist Glushkov met the molecular biologist Alexander Shuster.

Masterlek co-owners Alexander Shuster and Vitaly Martyanov undertook to promote the drug. They did not have a budget to promote Arbidol, and they were engaged in "guerrilla marketing", developing all sorts of creative promotions. For example, in 2003, before the next influenza epidemic, Masterlek began distributing Arbidol to pharmacy pharmacists for free. Those, having tested the medicine on themselves, recommended it to customers. Things began to improve.

In 2006, Shuster and Martyanov sold Masterlek and the rights to drugs to the largest Russian pharmaceutical company, Pharmstandard. Since then, Arbidol sales have grown even faster. “In 2008, the volume of Arbidol sales to the retail network amounted to 26 million packs, which is one third more than in 2007. The forecast for 2009 is an increase of another 20%,” Stanislav Reshetnikov, Head of the Pharmstandard Rx and OTC Marketing Department, is pleased. Maybe more - like three years ago, this drug as a remedy for the H1N1 virus is being advertised not only by pharmacy chains, but also by government officials on television.

“These “media” diseases are always like the projects of pharmaceutical campaigns. How many of them have already been - and SARS, and bird flu. Everyone should have died out by now, ”the president of the Society for Pharmacoeconomic Research, Professor Pavel Vorobyov, ironically.

The common flu, he says, kills at least 20,000 people in Russia every year. “And we are worried about the 83 victims in Mexico. You can't call it anything other than intimidation of the population for the sake of buying medicines, the academician is indignant. There are a thousand different ways to capitalize on fear. According to the industry newspaper Pharmvestnik, one of the state pharmacies in the Tver region sold a medicine for swine flu for 2,000 rubles. Later it turned out that this is a common dietary supplement based on garlic.