Supply Issues Aren't That Bad...

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...Unless your life, health and pain management rely on these medications:

"Australia faces a “dire” medicine shortage, with more than 300 drugs in short supply and another 80 anticipated to join the list, as doctors and pharmacists call for a national strategy to prevent the situation getting worse.

Drugs for diabetes, hormone replacement therapy, depression, nausea, stroke and contraception are among the 320 drugs listed by the TGA as in current short supply, with about 50 of these listed as critical. 

Another 80 are listed as anticipated to be in short supply, including anti-venom for the funnel web spider, and a drug used in leukaemia treatment. 

The Pharmacy Guild is also reporting shortages of off-the-shelf cold and flu medications, including liquid paracetamol for children, with new measures in place to try and manage supplies. 

The president of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, Karen Price, said the situation had been exacerbated by the Covid 19 pandemic affecting international supply chains, with the issue becoming more acute in recent years.

“What we’re finding is that we’re suddenly getting patients saying I can’t get that medication or the pharmacist has changed it … so this is becoming an increasing problem,” Price said."

This is just another area where our government and big business policies have screwed us:

“There is a whole sovereign risk issue here. We used to be great manufacturers of medication in the country, and unfortunately more and more of that has been lost, especially the generic medicine industry where a lot of that now is based in India and China and so forth,” he said."

Australia used to make most of what it needed. But for some time now we have had our manufacturing sector gutted. Describing a nation that cannot produce its own basic or life saving medications as "developed" is a cruel joke. Australia is regressing as a nation and our wealth is such a charade only those who are not aware of how much debt the average Australian is in can say with any seriousness that we are a wealthy nation. Our nation has been in a weak position for some time because of deliberate policies to gut local manufacturing, and recent rolling lockdowns have exposed just how precarious a situation we are in. 

Those of us who condemned the repeated lockdowns and centralised dictates of the supply chains and businesses were not even a little bit wrong. To solve one issue, a thousand issues were created and exacerbated. I would say politicians need to be held to account for this, but we have neither a legal system that cares nor a populous capable of comprehending why they, themselves, should care.

Maybe when you can't get that life saving or pain relieving medication you need, you'll finally be in a position to consider just how badly our society was manipulated in the last few years and the dangerous road our leaders have put us on. We don't have to become like Sri Lanka but our national leadership seems determined to flirt with such a fate.