The head of the Russian Ministry of Health, Mikhail Murashko, said that there were delays in the supply of foreign medicines in Russia, and instructed the regions to form a stock of drugs for at least four months. He is quoted by TASS.
According to him, the department gave the regions strict instructions "to have a sufficient amount of stocks of medicines" to ensure the treatment processes. At the same time, there were no refusals to supply or serious threats to the pharmaceutical market, Murashko added.
“For foreign products, sometimes logistics chains give delays, we don’t see any failures and big threats today, but difficulties in the speed of delivery, they matter.”
Murashko stressed that the supply of domestic drugs and the increase in production volumes are going according to plan, the drugs "quickly enter the market."
In September, Roszdravnadzor warned pharmacies about a shortage of dressings, hemostatic agents and hemostatic tourniquets. As the Pharmaceutical Bulletin wrote, citing an information letter and sources in regional pharmacy associations, now pharmacies must report weekly to the territorial authorities on the availability of the necessary medical devices.
This is not the first problem that the Russian pharmaceutical industry has faced since the start of the war. In May, the head of the scientific expertise of the pharmaceutical venture fund Inbio Ventures, Ilya Yasny, told The Insider that Russia was running out of reagents for laboratory tests. He also predicted problems with the production of medicines and disinfectants, in particular hydrogen peroxide. In June, Kommersant reported that there was a shortage of subsidized medicines in hospital pharmacies. Most of all, there is a shortage of antiepileptic drugs, blood pressure lowering drugs, insulin and hypoglycemic drugs, "foreign effective" psychotropic drugs, drugs for the treatment of thyroid diseases.