Global call for strategic planning for COVID-19 medical products

The comment piece, published in The Lancet Global Health, was signed by 55 signatories from across 20 countries.

Enormous emergency efforts are underway to find optimal medical products, to prevent, diagnose, and treat COVID-19, which approximately 7.8 billion people will depend on. With significant disruption of pharmaceutical production and supply, and increasing numbers of falsified and substandard products, strategic planning is needed now to ensure global access to quality-assured medical products and monitoring of supply chains.

Co-author Professor Paul Newton, who leads Medicine Quality at IDDO, said: ‘‘Vital interventions are needed to ensure global manufacture, access, protection, and monitoring of supply chains.

“The emergence of COVID-19 risks a parallel pandemic of substandard and falsified products unless we all act to ensure that there is a global plan for coordinated production and surveillance of the quality of the tests, medicines and vaccines that the world’s 7.8 billion people will depend on.

“There are multiple priorities in tackling this severe emergency but in the face of the unescapable shortages, disruption of supply chains and national hoarding, advance planning for ensuring access to good quality medical products, both for the multitude of diseases humans suffer from and for COVID-19 is vital – otherwise the benefits of modern medicine will be negated and people will die younger than they would have done without COVID-19.

“All our fates are bound together and any helpful COVID-19 products must be recognised as global assets.”

Read the full article here.