To date quite a number of patients around the country have been successful in accessing medications from overseas and importing them for personal use. I’m aware for example that more people in Tasmania have been treated and achieved a VL of zero in the last 3 months than in the last 3 years.

Not everyone appears to view that as cause for celebration. We can only speculate on what might happen in the future, but this has happened today within 24 hours of opening the Buyers Club

The TGA has a job to do, and that is to ensure the medications available to Australian’s are safe and useful. Why they let Chemist Warehouse sell bottles of water and call them homeopathic melatonin is beyond me but that’s another story.

My job as a doctor is to treat patients with medicines that work. I’m hopeful that the TGA will continue to respect your personal right to source medication from places where it is available at an affordable cost, rather than abuse its power to prevent that.

This could turn out to be the first big crisis for the Turnbull government – protect the interests of Gilead or those of ordinary Australians.