Brendan Shaw How much do you value your future health? How much do you value the future health of your kids and your grandkids? And how much do you think the Australian government values these things? Well, based on our recent report on the matter … not much! A recent report for Medicines Australia prepared by Biointelect and Shawview Consulting, Submission to the PBAC on the Base Case Discount Rate, reviewed the discount rate that Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory

Brendan Shaw “Economic activity contracted in 90 per cent of the world’s countries in 2020. This exceeded the proportion hit by the two world wars, the Great Depression and the global financial crisis. A pandemic, we now know, is a comprehensive disaster.” - Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator, Financial Times, 16 February 2022 "The unfolding COVID-19 pandemic has already led to millions of deaths, job losses, business failures, and school closings, triggering the

Brendan Shaw Article published in PharmaBoardroom on 1 February 2022 on key trends for 2022 can be found here. #pharma #health #vaccines #2022 #politics #government #technology

Brendan Shaw Article published in BioPharmaDispatch 9 April 2021 on the risks for government and industry in negotiations on a new strategic agreement for Australia's medicines policy can be found here (paywall). #medicines #Australia #PBS #government #industry #health

Brendan Shaw The news just in that the United Kingdom has formally approved the roll out of mass vaccinations for COVID-19 from next week is a moment to mark. The UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) approved the 95% effective vaccine to vaccinate the British population yesterday after and "an extremely thorough and scientifically rigorous review of all the evidence". From next week, the UK's National Health Service will start rolling out the initia

Brendan Shaw “Although premature mortality from NCDs is declining in most countries, for most the pace of change is too slow to achieve SDG target 3.4.“ - NCD Countdown 2030, The Lancet, 2020 In a little over 10 years from now – about 122 months or 3,700 days from today – the world will be evaluating how it has gone in achieving the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. These were agreed by all nations at the 2015 UN General Assembly as key goals for the global c

Brendan Shaw If it's real and if it sticks, the Australian government’s ‘New Medicines Funding Guarantee’ will be a significant improvement to Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. The first Intergenerational Report released in 2002 by the then Australian government painted a doomsday scenario of the PBS becoming one of the major causes of government expenditure growth over the next 40 years. Back then it predicted that the PBS would equal 3.4% of GDP by 2042. Even at t

Brendan Shaw Article published 24 September 2020 in PharmaBoardroom on US President Donald Trump's new Executive Order on Most Favoured Nation medicine pricing and its potential impacts on medicines pricing and availability in other high income countries. #medicine #price #health #usa #australia #reimbursement #trade #Trump

Brendan Shaw “… governments need to be convinced that investing in public health systems is absolutely necessary despite the multitude of competing demands for scarce budget resources. The current under-preparedness of many countries indicates that this case has not been convincingly made.” - World Bank. 2017. From Panic and Neglect to Investing in Health Security: Financing Preparedness at a National Level, p. 6. Imagine a world political leader, a president or prime ministe

Brendan Shaw More people on the planet die from cardiovascular disease than any other illness or injury. Cardiovascular disease is defined as disorders of the heart and blood vessels. It includes coronary heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, rheumatic heart disease and other conditions. Four out of five deaths from cardiovascular disease occur due to heart attacks and stroke and one-third of deaths occur prematurely to people under the age of 70. Global trends Cardiovascul

Brendan Shaw Blog published on Medium on 22 June 2020 can be found here. #COVID-19 #health #technology #resilience #funding

Rob Hnatuk, Ben Deaville and Jon Bastow* As lifelong friends resident in the USA, UK and France respectively we have been speaking weekly as the Covid-19 pandemic has unfolded. We all have an interest in healthcare and have been comparing progress in our respective countries and speculating on different strategies and how they will impact. Below we share data and discuss the varying approaches to distancing, mask-wearing and contact tracing. The views expressed are our own an

Brendan Shaw and Orin Chisholm Article published in the journal Frontiers in Pharmacology on 10 June 2020 on whether health systems can manage disruption. The article can be read here. #disruption #medicine #health #economics #innovation #policy

“Global capitalism will have to be re-balanced. The pre-COVID balance between efficiency and resilience will have to tilt on the side of resilience.” - Pascal Lamy, former Director General of the World Trade Organization, 2020 “… the notions of viability and resilience … are in conflict with short-term profitability and apparent efficiency.” - Hynes et al., 2020, A Systemic Approach to Dealing with COVID-19 and Future Shocks, OECD. “We should have learned the lesson of resili

My five-year-old niece has nailed it. While there are reams of news stories, pages of medical advice, hundreds of learned online published articles and millions upon millions of words in opinion pieces and online blogs, my niece has put the whole Covid-19 outbreak in simple language. And just as the Covid-19 outbreak happened in China during the Lunar New Year holiday period when families travel and reunite, it is particularly yucky at this time of year when in many countries

Recent news that two new drugs to treat the Ebola virus developed by the biopharmaceutical industry have achieved a 90% cure rate is welcome news. Breakthrough technology The two newest drugs that were undergoing clinical trial were so successful, that the trial’s independent monitoring committee recommended the trial be cancelled early and all patients in the trial switched over to the new medicines. These treatments developed by Regeneron and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, in p

Article published in PharmaBoardroom on 2 August 2019. The article can be found here: https://pharmaboardroom.com/articles/history-repeats-with-the-release-of-the-2019-who-essential-medicines-list/. #WHO #EML #medicine #accesstomedicines #pharmaceutical #health

A few days spent at the Health Technology Assessment International (HTAi) 2019 conference in Cologne this week gave a sense of how the practice of health technology assessment (HTA) needs to develop beyond 2020. The issues and debates at HTAi this year showed that the simple HTA processes some of us grew up with earlier in our careers are now in need of a refresh. Changes in society and health care systems around the world that mean that HTA needs to evolve if it is to be fit

For the first time ever in human history there are now five generations working together in the same workplace. While some Traditionalists born before 1945 are still working, the first people of Generation Z born after 1997 are now also entering the workforce. Traditionalists grew up after World War II, while Generation Z cannot remember a time when the internet didn’t exist. This can create sometimes hilarious situations as the recent YouTube clip of 'A Millennial Job Interv

The 2019 World Health Assembly in Geneva, the 72nd such meeting, as always covered many important health issues from around the world. A quick look at the agenda for the 72nd WHA shows many issues were discussed including managing public health emergencies, the eradication of polio, the implementation of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, environment and climate change, antimicrobial resistance, non-communicable diseases, preparing for influenza pandemics, fake medicine