MPs demand answers from feds over kids' med shortage, call for stocking up

OTTAWA -

Health Canada faced a series of questions from MPs on the House of Commons Health Committee Tuesday over the ongoing children’s pain medication shortages, including whether the country should be building a stockpile of these pharmaceuticals, or starting to produce its own supply.

Shortages of certain medications — specifically children’s pain and fever medication, such as ibuprofen and acetaminophen — have been ongoing for months, with signs of diminishing supply in the spring, before an “unprecedented spike in demand” in late summer, according to Health Canada’s Stephen Lucas.

This led to many Canadians facing empty shelves when they go to purchase children's Tylenol and Advil, amid a flu epidemic, a spike in RSV cases, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

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While Health Canada has recently secured access to an interim foreign supply of children’s acetaminophen and ibuprofen, officials will not specify how large the supply is that Canada has imported, or where exactly it will be distributed, aside from saying the medication will be sent to retail stores and hospitals.   

Lucas assured the committee Health Canada has been working with stakeholders since the spring, and that it has a “solid foundation to address shortages,” but that “demand continues to outpace supply.”

Conservative MP and committee co-chair Stephen Ellis had some strong words for the Health Canada officials, including raising concerns about the agency’s lack of transparency in addressing the medication shortage and warning the public about it sooner.

“It would occur to me very clearly that the minister was not involved in this for a very, very long time, which is shameful, and that Health Canada had a very, very poor plan in place here,” Ellis said. “Not to mention, I would suggest we should have anticipated that there might be a surge in the fall of the year, and taken it much more seriously in April. I think that's shameful.”

Further seeking to defend their handling of the situation, one Health Canada official told the committee that the issue of medication shortages — including antibiotics, anesthetics, intravenous drugs, and other pharmaceuticals — is longstanding, rather than an exceptional one this flu season. 

Stefania Trombetti, an assistant deputy minister at Health Canada, told the committee it’s not just pediatric ibuprofen and acetaminophen that need restocking: there are hundreds of medications that are in short supply, versus only 22 that are currently at the critical stage, and that a shortage does not necessarily mean they will fully run out of stock.

“We do manage these shortages successfully,” she said.

But Liberal MP Marcus Powlowski — who was an emergency room doctor before going into politics — said he disagrees with the assertion that Canada has successfully managed medication levels in the past.

“This was constantly a source of frustration for me in the emergency room, and I don’t blame it all on … the federal government,” he said, adding the hospital also couldn’t fix the problem, and questioning whether it’s an issue of regulatory processes slowing down imports.

“How can we address this problem? Because as an emergency room doctor, I was really friggin' frustrated with constantly, constantly having this process with drugs,” he said.

NDP, DOCTOR CALL ON FEDS TO STOCK UP

During the hearing, Dr. Saad Ahmed, a physician and co-founder of Critical Drugs Coalition, said Canada needs to increase its quantity of domestically-produced medications to prevent future shortages, a move he’s been calling for since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

He said there should be a national critical medications list, which he said could take time to assemble, and a stockpile of those critical medicines.

“Be it a supply of API, active pharmaceutical ingredient, be it actually some kind of manufacturing redundancy, or be it actually true stock physical stockpiles of certain select critical medications, that's definitely something we need to look into,” he told the committee.

The Public Health Agency of Canada currently maintains a supply of certain pharmaceuticals to be used in national emergency situations, including sedatives and antibiotics, as part of its critical drug reserve. It currently does not include children’s acetaminophen and ibuprofen.

When asked Tuesday whether Canada has a more broad stockpile system for other drugs, Lucas said Health Canada has learned from the pandemic and implementation of the critical drug reserve, while there are also “multiple strategies being undertaken,” to ensure Canadians have access to the medications they need. 

NDP MP Don Davies also asked the Health Canada officials whether a stockpile system should be implemented, and questioned whether Health Canada’s acceptance that there are hundreds of medication shortages means the agency has “normalized a disaster.”

“We can avert disaster in this,” Davies said. “Isn't the fundamental problem that Canada does not have a domestic supply of critical medicines, and that's where we need to be addressing our efforts, not on better reporting of the shortages?”

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh also commented on the issue Tuesday, calling on elected officials to find a solution instead of finger-pointing over who caused the problem in the first place.