GSK's Patrick Desbiens looking to support industry push for change

GBMA chair Jane Halton AO PSM said she is proud to lead a growing membership base with a board comprised of some of the most experienced health executives in the country.

Organon's Luke Cornish said it is more important than ever for companies to have a "seat at the policy table" and that these conversations need to be held in the appropriate place.

There are few similarities between reimbursement decision-making in Australia and New Zealand but they share a disconnect between public presentation and day-to-day reality.

New Zealand has agreed to procure 60,000 doses of Pfizer's COVID-19 oral antiviral candidate, PF-07321332, subject to approval by the country's regulator.

According to Bloomberg, the number of COVID-19 vaccines administered globally is 8.09 billion across 184 countries. The latest daily rate of doses administered is 37.1 million. COVAX has so far shipped over 589 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to 144 participants.

"While countries like Japan, Germany, Austria and Great Britain get around 60% of their new medicines reimbursed within three months of registration, Australia only manages to get 2% reimbursed within three months," says the new report commissioned by Johnson & Johnson.

Janssen's Biljana Naumovic and Susan Martin of Johnson & Johnson Medical spoke with BioPharmaDispatch about the new report prepared by Dr Brendan Shaw of Shawview Consulting.

We are constantly lectured about these frameworks being the best in the world. Yet, obviously not, given to this day they are still considered incapable of dealing with the most important therapeutic interventions in living memory.

"The PBAC now has more information and data to support these two applications than any other country has requested," said the company in a statement.

The Juvenile Arthritis Foundation Australia has welcomed the new parliamentary inquiry into juvenile arthritis and other childhood rheumatic diseases.

The interim report of the independent review has been delivered to health minister Andrew Little and it has found the agency is "underperforming", that its decision-making is "opaque" and excessively focused on cost.

Stakeholders have paid tribute to health minister Greg Hunt after he announced he will not recontest his electorate at the next federal election.

Health minister Greg Hunt has used his ministerial powers to extend funding for antiretroviral therapy for HIV but outside the PBS.

Johnson & Johnson is supporting the Children's Ground organisation to protect Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory against COVID-19.

“Within weeks of the pilot starting we knew our people at Sanofi and the PACE mentees had a lot to offer one another," said Michelle Zimany, the head of human resources for Sanofi Australia and New Zealand.

"The proposed offer price represents a premium of 20 cents per share (or 12.9%) over the price agreed between API and Wesfarmers under the scheme implementation deed announced on 8 November 2021," said Woolworths in a statement.

The Senate backed the enabling legislation for the new PBS pricing framework but only after questioning from a key crossbencher that revealed more about the secret list of medicines used to calculate the $1.9 billion in savings.

This week must surely rank as one of the more strange in PBS history regardless of whether the parliament ends up endorsing the enabling legislation for the new pricing framework.

The enabling legislation for the new PBS pricing framework has one day to navigate the Senate before the end of 2021.

"We have raised concerns both with the Department of Health and Minister Hunt's office of the potential for increased out of pocket costs for patients receiving a medicine under that general co-payment that do not have a concession or entitlement card," said the president of the Guild's Victorian branch Anthony Tassone.