Ridiculed for their weirdly incompetent response to last fall’s shortage of children’s fever medication, which has ended up costing Albertans $80 million for 1.25 million bottles of non-standard products that can’t be bought off the shelf, Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party (UCP) government decided to brazen it out instead.
“Children’s medication on way to pharmacies,” whooped the headline on the government’s news release Tuesday, as if the UCP were just now riding to the rescue.
This echoed the government’s “help is on the way” messaging at the time the purchase was announced in early December.
“The wait is over! Help is now here,” Premier Danielle Smith chirped at a news conference in the aisles of a London Drugs pharmacy in Edmonton.
Back in December, of course, shelves were bare of familiar brands like children’s Tylenol and Advil, hospitals were packed with sick kids battling respiratory viruses like influenza, RSV and COVID-19, and Conservatives just couldn’t stop themselves from blaming Justin Trudeau.
But that was then and this is now. By the time the stuff was approved by Health Canada and bottles started finding their way to Alberta – an earlier shipment went straight to hospitals – trusted and familiar brands had already reappeared on the shelves of the province’s drugstores.
Just the same, the government release enthused, “Alberta families can soon purchase children’s liquid pain and fever medication from their local pharmacies.”
The question, posed last Friday in a headline by Global News, is, with more familiar products available again, “Why would any parent purchase this?”
Tylenol and Advil, after all, can be purchased without a conversation with a pharmacist, come in a normal suspension not a weaker blend with an unfamiliar orange flavour like the product Alberta Health ordered from Turkey, and have a familiar dispenser.
But production of the oddball Turkish medicine – which quickly earned the derisive sobriquet Tylenot – was negotiated in haste in early December with Atabay Pharmaceuticals and Fine Chemicals Inc. of Istanbul in what appears to have been as much as effort to own the Libs in Ottawa as to restock shelves of Alberta pharmacies with a needed product.
Maybe the fact it was manufactured by a company owned by the mother of unsuccessful Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mehmet Oz had something to do with the deal hastily cobbled together or maybe it didn’t. We’ll likely never find out about that.
But one thing’s for sure, in two years when the sell-by date on this stuff rolls around, there are still going to be boxes of the bottles gathering dust in the storage rooms of Alberta pharmacies.
It was NDP Children’s Services Critic Rakhi Pancholi who asked the money question about who would actually buy the stuff, even with the Alberta government heavily subsidizing the bottles, when there are adequate supplies of products parents are used to buying.
“If they have what they already know at a dosage they’re familiar with and a flavor they know their kids will take, that’s what they’re going to purchase,” she told Global’s reporter. It’s pretty hard to argue with that.
As Panchioli explained it, the UCP “were in a rush at every opportunity possible to try to show up the federal government and try to prove something in their ongoing political spat with the federal government.”
Notwithstanding the Alberta government’s hostility to everything federal, though, Health Minister Jason Copping assured Albertans that they could be confident in the product since it had been approved by Health Canada.
The stuff will be marketed as Parol and Pedifen, 750,000 bottles of the former and 500,000 bottles of the latter, and will be sold in pharmacies for about $12 a bottle, the news release indicated. The cost per unit is about $14, it said. But simple arithmetic suggests the true cost per bottle is about $64.
Well, from the UCP’s perspective, it must have sounded like a good idea at the time, and, what the heck, it’s only going to cost $80-million.
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