[e-drug] Divide & Conquer: A look inside the EU pharmaceutical industry lobby

e-drug
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E-DRUG: Divide & Conquer: A look inside the EU pharmaceutical industry lobby
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Dear Colleagues:

Here's an interesting report on pharmaceutical industry lobbying activities
in Europe.

HAI Europe / CEO latest report Divide & Conquer: A look inside the EU
pharmaceutical industry lobby
http://haieurope.org/work-areas/democratisation-of-medicines-policy-2/promoting-independent-patient-organisations/

Executive Summary
This report surveyed the entries made by pharmaceutical companies and
their representatives in the EU’s lobby Transparency Register to find out how much the industry claimed to spend on lobbying. According to these findings, the pharmaceutical industry lobby is spending more than €40 million annually to influence decision making in the European Union
(EU) – of which nearly half is spent by drug manufacturers on in-house lobbyists.

Results from this study show that many pharmaceutical companies lobbying
the European Commission on legislation fail to declare their activities to the Register. As registration to the Transparency Register is voluntary, many pharmaceutical companies choose not to declare their expenditures. If recorded properly, expenditure on lobbying activities by the industry could *be shown to be as high as €91 million annually.

Civil society organisations active on EU medicines issues, on the other
hand, spend a combined €3.4 million per year. With the immense disparity between the affluence of public interest groups and the industrial lobby, it becomes even more difficult to level the policy playing field. This estimate is more comparable to pharma’s lobby footprint in the USA,
where the pharmaceutical manufacturing sector has reportedly spent about €85.5 million ($115 million USD) in lobbying the American government in 2011. The report estimates that 220 lobbyists are active in the EU on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry, which pales in comparison to nearly 1500 industry lobbyists documented in the US in 2011. Clear and enforced
reporting rules in the US yield a more accurate picture of pharma’s lobby contingent in America as compared to the EU.

João L. Carapinha
Pharmaceutical Policy Analyst
www.carapinha.com

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