GENOA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 26th May, 2020) ENOA, Italy, May 26 (Sputnik), Anastasia Levchenko - European pharmaceutical firms have been struggling with logistical problems during the COVID-19 pandemic as a result of lockdowns in China and India, their close partners, which has forced them into competition with tech giants such as Apple and GENOA (Pakistan Point news / Sputnik - 26th May, 2020) oogle to bring products to Europe on charter flights, Medicines for Europe Director GENOA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 26th May, 2020) eneral Adrian van den Hoven told Sputnik in an interview.
"All of our companies either have factories or have commercial partners in both China and India. We do a lot of business with China and India. We had problems, logistical problems with both countries. In January and February, we had problems in China because some chemical factories closed, and a lot of the very basic chemicals come from China. Also, the ports closed, so you could not ship anything out of China. That was really very complicated," van den Hoven, who heads the alliance representing Europe's generic and biosimilar pharmaceutical industries, said.
The European pharmaceutical industry also faced difficulties when the Indian government announced a nationwide lockdown, van den Hoven stated.
"With India, we had a different problem. They closed down the country and then a lot of the workers went home and then they could not go back to their factory again. A lot of the ports closed, so we had logistical problems with India as well. So, we had to find special charter planes to get the chemicals out of there ... We had to pay for a lot of planes basically to fly there to get things we needed. It was very expensive," the association chief said.
Before the outbreak of COVID-19, drug manufacturers often used commercial flights to bring products to Europe as the shipments often take up little space in the baggage holds of passenger aircraft, van den Hoven remarked.
"But when the commercial airlines shut down in Europe, then we had to hire cargo planes that cost a fortune and they were even more expensive because we had to compete against Apple and Google and these kinds of companies that are rich. So that was a really big expense, it cost us a lot of money," van den Hoven said.
Despite the challenges, the European pharmaceutical industry has been able to maintain medicine supply lines across the continent without interruption, primarily due to reserves that were being held by companies.
Additionally, Europe is not totally reliant on China for the production of medicine and personal protective equipment, the association chief said.
"I will be honest, we thought we would have very big problems [with drugs], we thought many patients would not get enough, especially of those medicines for ventilators. But the industry worked very, very hard and avoided that situation," van den Hoven said.
Pharmaceutical companies also played a crucial role in convincing European governments not to close essential factories, such as those that produce medicine and foodstuffs, as countries implemented nationwide lockdowns to limit the spread of COVID-19, the association chief noted.
Several countries took steps to limit the export of medical equipment and drugs in February as the COVID-19 outbreak began to spread across the globe. Leading EU officials held talks with their Indian counterparts in late March on the topic of paracetamol supplies as several European countries enforced limits on purchases amid concerns of impending shortages.
