Love Greg Jefferys Blog!

I don’t regret ordering the generics the other day. It’s a small price to pay for a few months wellness. I can do a lot with three months of good health. If I wait and it is triaged I am at the bottom of the queue.

Plus, who would trust Sussan Ley?…she’s totally shifty.

I think on the whole though it’s wonderful news, because a whole lot of really sick people without any money are surely going to get treated. Well, reasonably surely….

The prescribing details have not yet been released but they have said that they are following PBAC recommendations and so far they have. The medication is to be available to everyone. Even prisons, no discrimination with prescribing. The interview this morning said 1 billion plus for this medication. No limits. If as recommended by the PBS they are to be prescribed by GP’s then there will be no restrictions in treating. As people are already able to have scripts from GP’s I see no reason why this should change once the medications are listed.

The minister clearly stated the number of people requiring treatment and said they would be treated. Not all people will want to be treated straight away. Some people don’t have it as a priority just at the moment and others are waiting for even better medications that are on the horizon and have shorter treatment times. Some with previous exposure to DAA meds are waiting for meds with a higher success rate in this population.

This great news that has come about with a huge amount of hard work and lobbying from a large amount of people other than the people running the Buyers club and I think that could be acknowledged.

The Buyers club has done a wonderful job in providing medications for people who felt they needed the medications immediacy and those that didn’t believe that they would be approved. People have been empowered by being able to take the decision into there own hands and they have been treated and cured or waiting for a cure. Job well done.

We should all be celebrating.

I am absolutely celebrating for those who are seriously ill who will be the first cabs off the rank and get their meds asap (which will still be some time after March, but hey its happening now – which is great)

But realistically, it will take many years at the rate of $1bil spending/every 5 yrs to even make a dent in the numbers, since thousands more new infections are adding to that list every year. Many will not be prepared to get sicker and begin to have real problems before their turn comes up. I don’t see why the idea that these meds will have to be triaged *due to cost* is so hard to grasp..it is the only logical way they can be distributed with a meagre amount of fund available (relative to the overall projected amount)

It will be interesting to see the detail. But until then the good news is that it appears we will no longer be damaging people with interferon and the success rate will be at least 1.5 times as good. And that is good news!

G

I don’t understand how they are going to do this with the amount of money allocated. So I understand people’s scepticism entirely. I look forward to hearing the detail.

What I do know, what I do think makes this a truly historic announcement are 3 little words – “available to all”. This is a shift in the zeitgeist that shouldn’t be underestimated. That only the sickest get treatment at all had become the accepted mode of treatment delivery and was more and more cemented into the public mind with each passing day as just the way hepatitis c was handled.

Now the concept of universal access is out of the bag with a bang. While I don’t know how they can pull it off (without generics) for that amount of money or if they will, I am at least very grateful they’ve had the courage to shift the agenda that dramatically.

Sussan Ley on the ABC … no mention of time frames for ” treating everyone ” just grandiose statements of how wonderful the government is.

Hard not to be cynical isn’t it?

Indeed.
It was a political announcement. it’s a political decision.

The FixHepC model, incorporating as it does the testing regime, is potentially devastating to Big Pharma. It’s Napster to the music industry (I’m not convinced by the Uber analogy). The Big Pharma strategists may be thinking that their business model may not be able to change itself to adapt any more than the music industry has.

Smart move for Gilead to take the high moral ground by going for universal elimination, slash the cost to enable that to be done – flood the market to retain market share.

But also lobby to make it as hard as possible for buyers’ clubs like FixHepC to function.