Is the Carney government abandoning national pharmacare?

Health Minister Marjorie Michel told reporters the government is “in a new context,” and offered no timeline for further pharmacare deals with provinces and territories.

Canada’s drug pricing formula, set by the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board (PMPRB), is what makes a federal pharmacare plan possible. Universal pharmacare, with its bulk pricing arrangements, could set a dangerous precedent from the perspective of industry. If Canada weakens PMPRB rules in response to pressure from the White House and U.S. companies (as reported in April), pharmacare becomes economically unviable.

In a strongly-worded request, President Trump encouraged Pharma to charge higher prices in other countries, asking that profits be translated into lower U.S. drug prices. 
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RFK Jr.’s vaccine plan could trigger shortages and price hikes worldwide

Kennedy wants to overhaul the U.S. system for compensating vaccine injuries.

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is calling for reforms to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which shields manufacturers from direct liability.

The VICP was created in 1986 to prevent vaccine shortages by shifting injury claims to a no-fault system funded by the U.S. government. Weakening those protections could cause companies to stop making some vaccines, or put fewer resources into developing new ones.

With less access to the world’s most overpriced market, the disruption could quickly ripple outward, raising costs and limiting supply for countries worldwide.
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Insurers oppose Ontario’s proposed restrictions on exclusivity deals with pharmacies

Ontario is poised to regulate insurer–pharmacy exclusivity deals, but the insurance industry says this could drive up drug plan costs, especially for rare disease drugs.

The deals, known as Preferred Pharmacy Networks (PPNs), restrict where patients can fill prescriptions, raising both access and monopoly concerns.

Pharmacists, independent businesses, and patient advocates say PPNs undermine patient choice and concentrate market power. A government decision is pending after a second round of public consultation. 
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Viral infections can awaken dormant breast cancer

Just as HPV can drive cervical cancer, respiratory viruses can awaken hidden threats in the lungs.

Dormant breast cancer cells seeded in the lungs of mice rapidly expanded into metastatic lesions within days of a respiratory virus infection. Even after inflammatory triggers waned, metastases continued growing, enabled by immune cells that appeared to suppress anti-tumour responses.

Human observational data show corresponding spikes in cancer deaths and lung metastases among people who had contracted COVID. The findings strongly suggest respiratory viruses don’t just pose a short-term threat, particularly to cancer survivors. 
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U.S. could override Canada’s privacy protections

Our health records are vulnerable to U.S. access due to outdated privacy laws and foreign cloud control.

Experts say electronic medical records held by U.S. tech companies could be subject to seizure by an increasingly hostile U.S. government. The CLOUD Act, passed in 2018, lets U.S. authorities force companies to hand over customer data, even if it’s stored on Canadian servers.

Canadian clinics and hospitals rely on U.S.-hosted software. While health data is usually encrypted and stored in Canada, ownership of the servers means American law can still apply, creating a potential pipeline to U.S. investigators (or commercial interests).

Without stronger privacy laws or purpose-built Canadian cloud infrastructure, we risk ceding control of our population health data to the hostile hyperpower in our basement.

These concerns are amplified by recent developments in the U.S., where the White House is launching a sweeping new program to centralize patient health data through partnerships with Google, Amazon, and Apple, among others.

The new tracking system is being touted as an interoperability fix for fragmented care, but critics say it will deepen surveillance and data commercialization. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, which will oversee the system, recently handed over its existing database to ICE.

Canadians, whose health records are hosted on U.S.-controlled infrastructure, would be ill-advised to ignore the implications. 
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