2024-10-23 09:00:00
The announcement by Sanofi of its decision to sell shares in its subsidiary Opella, which produces old, generic and unprofitable drugs – including Doliprane – to an American investment fund has inflamed the French political class. From Jordan Bardella (National Rally) to Jean-Luc Mélenchon (La France insoumise), including Marine Tondelier (Les Ecologistes) or Boris Vallaud (Socialist Party), everyone is outraged by the sale of this “strategic asset” to a foreign funds. Certainly, the defense of employment raises legitimate concerns among the employees concerned; but should we really qualify as “strategic” the manufacturing and distribution of boxes of tablets whose active ingredient has been in the public domain for decades, and at very low margins?
Read also | Article reserved for our subscribers Sale of Doliprane: “Sanofi and the State have both made compromises”
Add to your selections
Because here is a medication, very useful and very appreciated by millions of users around the world, known by several names, here Efferalgan or Dafalgan, there Tylenol or Panadol, or even… Doliprane. If this medicine has so many different names, it is because it has been a public good for a long time. Its active ingredient is paracetamol, a molecule whose effects, particularly against pain, were identified as early as 1880. The pharmaceutical innovation of the last years of the 19th century was breathtaking: synthesis of aspirin, heroin and, more later, the first amphetamines. More than a century has passed, and, like all these inventions, paracetamol is no longer protected by any patent: any pharmaceutical laboratory can use it, make it into a medicine, and market it under its own brand.
Such freedom to copy fuels keen competition in the generic market, the virtues of which are known: to sell at the lowest price, each manufacturer must be as efficient as possible in producing at the lowest cost, and as lean as possible in reducing its margins. But the “optimization” of each stage of the production chain is not without pitfalls. Upstream, the production of active ingredients relies on a heavy, often polluting chemical industry. This production is almost exclusively located in China or India, where its cost is lower, because the work is less paid there than in France or Europe, and environmental standards are less strict. Such a location is not without risk: a paracetamol factory in Wuxi, in the distant province of Jiangsu, is experiencing difficulties and, from Brest to Palermo, countless patients are struggling to obtain the medicine they need.
You have 59.33% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
1729674366
#manufacture #distribution #drugs #Doliprane #strategic
