Warnings patients will die if new Government Bill passes, law expert says it’s being rushed through
A terminally ill mum-of-two is pleading with the Government to reassess proposed legislation that will make it illegal for her to access life-extending medication.
Patient Voice Aotearoa said if the Therapeutic Products Bill is not changed, it will not only cost lives but stop the media and advocates from publically advertising unfunded treatments.
Theresa Zame is terminally ill.
Last June, she was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer and was told she had just nine months to live.
“All the things that you had planned for life, that’s all going to change and some of them aren’t going to happen, it’s hard,” Zame said.
But since taking the medication tagrix, she said the cancer, which had spread to her liver, has gone and the tumour in her left lung has shrunk.
“It’s completely changed my life,” Zame said.
Tagrix, a generic version of the AstraZeneca drug tagrisso, is not funded or registered in New Zealand. So Zame accesses it from Bangladesh via a prescription from her oncologist.
Tagrix costs $1000 a month and tagrisso costs $10,000.
“We just don’t have those sorts of funds,” Zame said.
But under the proposed Therapeutic Products Bill – which will replace the dated 1981 Medicines Act – it will be illegal for patients like Zame to privately import medication via the mail.
“If this legislation goes through, those patients will not be able to receive those medicines. As a result – in some instances – those patients will die,” Patient Voice Aotearoa chair Malcolm Mulholland said.
Patient Voice Aotearoa believes thousands of patients will be impacted by the Bill, which has passed its first reading.
Mulholland is concerned about a number of clauses including the broad definition of the term “advertisement”.
He said it will make it illegal for patients to publically advertise unfunded treatments like creating a Givealittle page or speaking to the media.
“That is the means by which they raise awareness, by which politicians give Pharmac more funding,” Mulholland said.
“It’s just a form of censorship that I think most New Zealanders will find abhorrent.”
Patient Voice Aotearoa chair Malcolm Mulholland is a fucking legend. He has stood for the sick and the ill, losing his own partner and then diagnosing with cancer himself.
He is a spectacular defender of human rights and has championed against the health inequalities so prevent in our public health system.
If he says it it bad. It is bad!
When Professor Jane Kelly says it is bad, it is bad!
Those proceedings continued on Wednesday with the proposed Bill drawing criticism from a range of agencies.
“It is one of the worst examples that I have seen of legislation being rushed through,” Auckland University law Professor Jane Kelsey said.
“We have sought much more clarity,” Health Select Committee chair Dr Tracey McLellan said. “It’s absolutely on our radar.”
…we now know the extent of corporate lobbying in the construction of policy to benefit themselves.
Ensuring market monopolies isn’t a public health measure, it’s a corporate health measure.
This isn’t about your well being and health, this is about pharmaceutical profit margins.
This Bill must be halted and if the Greens have finished starting wars with white cis males, could they please demand Labour put the brakes on this now!
It is outrageous this bill has gotten this far!
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At last an awareness of this utterly horrendous bill playing into the vast and greedy gullet of pharmaceutical companies and being sneaked through under the radar.
If all the wokey folk ever discovered history they might learn about the controversy played out in the seventies/eighties when the gay population were fighting Anthony Fauci and the drug he was promoting when there were alternative safer and cheaper therapies for HIV/Aids.
I first learned of this saga reading Candice Pert’s book ‘Molecules of Emotion’ some years ago. Pert in the seventies was the person who first isolated the opiate receptor on a cell.
The story is covered in detail in Robert Kennedy Jnr’s book ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’
“Ensuring market monopolies isn’t a public health measure, it’s a corporate health measure.”
Bingo, there should be common sense controls on imports (such as a GPs prescription) but this provides an architecture that facilitates a cartel take over, inching NZ towards the US model which works so well.
pressure groups do not gaurantee the effectiveness of an expensive over-hyped drug
and we are a haven for snake oil salemen and nutrition products
I think you need to consider the interests of all the stakeholders here Martyn. Removal of the Section 29 provision may help some companies but in can just as easily mean that some drugs won’t be available because, based on volume, it’s not worth paying the medsafe fees to register a drug and have the compliant packaging/artwork etc. Any small sales will disappear. You can just as easily argue pharmacy chains don’t want a parallel channel for importation, rather some global giant worry about 10 packs of product x.
Healthcare is big business for a lot stakeholders, not just your favourite target
Grow your own weed and middle finger the system, they had their chance and blew it.
A fair enough plan for some people but probably not a panacea for a load of other diseases.
Do some research into the Endocannabinoid System. You will be surprised what cannabis is useful for.