New furore over Smith’s Pfizer job
LABOUR leadership contender Owen Smith lobbied for his drugs giant employer at a time when it was putting pressure on a developing country into paying ten times the going rate for a heart drug, it emerged last night.
Mr Smith was head of government relations for the Pfizer pharmaceuticals company when it mounted legal action to force the Philippines authorities to pay $1 a pill for Norvasc, a hypertension medicine.
The conglomerate began the action after the country tried to cut its health bill by importing the drug from India, where it cost 10 cents a pill.
It is the latest embarrassing detail to emerge about Mr Smith’s time at the company, with Leftwing supporters of Mr Corbyn accusing him of being in favour of privatising the NHS. They are portraying him as a ‘Blairite Big Pharma lobbyist’ – claims which Mr Smith denies.
Mr Smith joined the firm in 2005, a year before the Philippines action, and when the company was embroiled in a storm over pricing South Africans out of AIDS medication by holding an anti-fungal drug under patent and selling it for £5 a capsule, compared with the non-patent price of 4p. In February 2006, just two weeks before Pfizer launched its action against the Philippines, Mr Smith appeared before the All Party Parliamentary Group on Corporate Responsibility and defended the drug industry’s need to protect ‘commercially valuable intellectual property’.
The Philippines has high drug prices compared with many of its neighbours because the market is underdeveloped, forcing consumers to buy expensive name-brand drugs.
After a two-year legal wrangle, the company lost the battle and the country was able to put Norvasc on an ‘essential drug list’ and cut its price by half. A spokesman for Mr Owen said last night: ‘Owen was head of Pfizer’s UK policy and had nothing to do with international decisions.’