Not our business

Covid preparations disappeared a month ago, but officials are sure that this problem is not their own, but owners of pharmacies

Judging by the numerous complaints of the townspeople about the hotline on the coronavirus and in a single reference service on the availability of medicines in the northern capital, the most frequently prescribed drugs for Covid - FavipiRaria, Tavliksin, Metical Procedic, Azitromycin, etc. - disappeared from the Petersburgsky pharmacy shelves about a month ago. Interruptions in the supply of both expensive antibiotics and cheap antipyreters are confirmed by pharmacists of large city pharmacy networks - Lakes, Health, Nevis, First Aid, St. Petersburg Pharmacies, Pharmacor.

From the beginning of October on weekdays from half an hour to an hour, Petersburgers have to call on a pharmacy certificate to find out which of the city pharmacies for the current day there is one or another drug.

On the morning of November 16, I spent 40 minutes of waiting in the telephone line. At the same time, in no pharmacy of the city there was neither Favipiravir, nor a Tavanik, nor the markup. In only two, several packages of azithromycin and levofloxacin left, but

The pharmacists recommended that I book scarce medicines before breaking after them.

Otherwise, the probability of having time to get to the pharmacy and buy the necessary funds extremely small.

According to the observations of pharmacists, today, patients with a slight form of coronavirus course, doctors most often prescribe antibiotics with the active substance azithromycin. Those who have moved to the stage of moderate severity, but are still treated on an outpatient basis - Levofloxacin. It is their buyers who grab them in the first two to three hours after entering the pharmacy.

“I fell ill at the end of October,” Lyudmila Vorontsova, an elderly Petersburzhenka, told the “new”. - On November 4, computed tomography revealed more than 30% of the lungs. The doctor prescribed me levofloxacin - 750 mg once a day for ten days. That is, only two packs, but even one in the pharmacies of St. Petersburg could not find. After calling the reference, it turned out that the nearest place where you can buy the medicine is Moscow. As a result, the son bought a plane ticket and flew for an antibiotic for me to the capital. ”

As the head of the Association of Russian Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Viktor Dmitriev, the problem with the absence of medicines for coronavirus concerns not only St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region, said, it has a federal scale.

According to him, in addition to the increased need for the population for these drugs, their acute shortage in Russian pharmacies is due to the fact that all antibiotics and antiviral drugs go primarily to medical institutions, and only then the remains enter retail sale.

“They are not enough, these supplies do not cover the real need for patients for medicines,” says Dmitriev. “In addition, except for those who really get sick and need medicines, in Russia there is still a significant proportion of alarmed people buying drugs for the future.”

The St. Petersburg Health Committee “Novye” explained that all pharmacies of the retail sale of drugs are non-state, so the agency is not responsible for the availability of goods and its price there: “Only four coronaviral drugs are included in the minimum assortment of drugs that are mandatory in pharmacies of all forms of ownership,” the press secretary of the committee commented on Olga Ryabinina. - The list of drugs was approved by the Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation. The absence of such drugs is fraught with fines. The control of the minimum assortment is carried out by Roszdravnadzor. ”