Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb warned of further drug shortages thanks to the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act.
Some 130 drugs are currently in shortage, according to the FDA. Gottlieb clarified during an interview on CBS News’s Face the Nation that these shortages mostly apply to the sterile injectable drugs, which can often mean cancer treatments and the like. The Inflation Reduction Act capped drug prices.
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“The features under the Inflation Reduction Act will exacerbate this problem, because it’ll prevent these generic manufacturers from being able to take price increases,” Gottlieb said. “For example, if they enter a market for the first time, or they spend a lot of money upgrading a facility to be compliant with state-of-the-art regulations, they’re not going to be able to take a price increase to recoup some of those costs,” he added. “So, it’s going to come out of their own pocket.”
Gottlieb went on to explain that injectable drugs are especially short because companies “need to leave a margin in so people can reinvest in manufacturing facilities, make sure they’re high-quality. They haven’t done that, and things go wrong, and it results in shortages.”
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One example of an injectable drug that is experiencing an extreme shortage is Ozempic, a treatment for diabetes.
Health providers handed out over 313,000 prescriptions for Ozempic in the last full week of January, up roughly 78% from the 176,000 written the year before, according to analysis from JPMorgan.
