ACCOUNTS OF EUROPEAN MEDICINES AGENCY REJECTED BY EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AFTER DRUG SCANDALS

THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT REFUSED TO APPROVE EMA’S ACCOUNTS

 IN MAY 637 MEMBERS OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT VOTED AGAINST AN APPROVAL OF THE ACCOUNTS OF THE EUROPEAN MEDICINES AGENCY. ONLY FOUR MEMBERS WOULD APPROVE

 By Kaysa Nynne Kledermann

An overwhelming majority of the European Parliament decided in May 2011 not to approve the accounts of the European Medicines Agency (EMA). This according to a report appearing in Danish media on June 10, 2011.

 The Agency, that approves and monitors drugs at the European level, is mainly funded by the pharmaceutical industry.

 The European Parliament asks for EMA’s financial structure to be analyzed in a report.

The accounts will be treated in the European Parliament for a second time in November.

There are several reasons for this parliamentarian landmark decision.

 Among other things it happens in the wake of the withdrawal from the market of the slender means “Mediator”.

It took EMA no less than ten years, from the first reports of serious adverse events in the use of the slender means “Mediator” occurred, and until the pills were finally drawn from the market.

Danish professor Peter Gøtzsche of the Nordic Cochrane Centre at the National Hospital in Copenhagen has personally experienced, how medicines agencies, that ideally are set in the world to protect it’s citizens, are in reality more concerned with the interests of thepharmaceutical industry.

 For three years he fought with EMA to obtain clinical studies of several other slimming products, that were withdrawn from the market.

 But he was rejected on grounds of “the commercial interests of the companies”.

 Not until the European Ombudsman interfered, the surveys were delivered:

‘EMA puts the profit of the pharmaceutical firms above the interests of patients and above their lives and health, “writes Peter Gøtzsche and a collegue, doctor Anders Jørgensen, in British Medical Journal.

Gøtzsche finds it satisfying, that the European Parliament has decided to look closer at the funding of EMA and the conflicts of interest among that body’s employees.

Danish member of the European Parliament’s Budgetary Control Committee, the danish social democrat Christel Schaldemose, agrees.

She says, that it is “highly unusual” that the parliament votes so clearly against the adoption of an accounting. Only four MPs would approve the EMA’s accounts, while 637 would not.