One of the world’s biggest makers of hydroxychloroquine has accused Chinese factories of price gouging it on important ingredients for an antimalarial drug promoted by US president Donald Trump as a potential coronavirus cure.
India is the largest producer of hydroxychloroquine, a drug that Mr Trump has described as a “game changer” in the hunt for a Covid-19 treatment, even though experts within his own administration have warned that its efficacy is unproven and it is potentially dangerous. The country relies on raw materials from China to produce the finished drug.
Governments including those in the US and Brazil have lined up to purchase hydroxychloroquine from Indian companies, which are also under pressure from New Delhi to supply the drug to frontline health workers. Surging demand has pushed up prices across the supply chain.
“Everything has [had] a multifold increase, most of the raw materials have gone up 10 fold to 20 fold,” said Sharvil Patel, managing director of drugmaker Zydus Cadila, in an interview with the Financial Times.
Mr Patel said some of the company’s existing contracts with Chinese suppliers had not been honoured on the terms at which they were signed. “They just say they don’t have material, and when you pay them five times more, 10 times more, then they get material.”
Suppliers in China confirmed that they had increased prices of drug ingredients. An official at Anhui Haihua Chemical Technology said that it had boosted prices of m-chloroaniline, a hydroxychloroquine ingredient, by 375 per cent since the start of the year to Rmb190,000 ($26,840) per tonne. The company, based in eastern China, does not supply Zydus but works with other Indian drug firms.
The Chinese supplier said it had been forced to increase prices of the ingredient and “adjust” its contracts with Indian buyers as local governments in China were themselves making bulk purchases of hydroxychloroquine. Government contracts “are a higher priority” than customers in India, explained the official.
Manufacturing issues at Zydus Cadila, which has significantly boosted its production of hydroxychloroquine, have been worsened by the lockdown of much economic activity in India because of the spread of the virus.
The use of hydroxychloroquine to treat coronavirus has been a divisive issue in the Trump administration, but its use has also stirred controversy in India.
The country has advised its frontline medical staff and those that have been in close contact with those infected with Covid-19 to take the drug as a preventive treatment. That has been questioned by medical experts who warn its side effects could include cardiac arrest.
“This is not a benign drug . . . the virus might not kill you, but hydroxychloroquine could,” said SP Kalantri, director professor of medicine at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences. “There is a lot of hype, hope and mass hysteria for hydroxychloroquine. It is extremely important during a pandemic that authorities are able to think rationally and prescribe the drug for the right reasons.”
This week, a non-peer-reviewed US study found that patients who took hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment had a higher death rate than those who did not.
Mr Patel said that Zydus Cadila was in the process of trying to develop its own coronavirus vaccine and was not currently conducting its own trials using hydroxychloroquine. “There are enough trials going on,” he said.
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April 24, 2020 at 06:04AM
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Hydroxychloroquine maker says China overcharging for ingredients - Financial Times
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