Pfizer UK’s distribution plan ‘an excuse to end parallel trade’

Pfizer’s plan to assume full responsibility for the delivery of its drugs from factory to pharmacy has been described by one industry expert as a deliberate attempt in “muddying the waters” between stopping counterfeit medicines entering the company and ending parallel trade.

The UK arm of the world’s largest pharmaceutical company last week said it was introducing new distribution arrangements of its own following the discovery that fake batches of Lipitor had entered the country.

Martin Sawer, executive director of the British Association of Pharmaceutical Wholesalers (BAPW), has said that Pfizer may be also be attempting to halt the “entirely legitimate” activity of parallel trade – an act which “slanders” the full-line pharmaceutical wholesaling industry, he wrote in a letter to the Financial Times.

He stated: “Our common regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, has publicly stated that it has no evidence that counterfeit medicines have entered the UK due to parallel trade.”

Mr Sawer concluded by saying that it was criminals who were to blame for the introduction of counterfeit medicines into the supply chain, rather than the actions of full-line pharmaceutical wholesalers.

For anyone to say otherwise would be “disingenuous”, he stated.

BAPW only represents full-line wholesalers, which stock and supply a full range of products to customers, even where there is little or no profit to be made from some of them.

This differentiates from short-line wholesalers, which stock products that a profitable.