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Respectively former vice-president and former president of Act Up-Paris, Pauline Londeix and Jérôme Martin founded in June 2019 the Observatory for transparency in drug policies (OTMeds), to ensure the implementation in France of the “Resolution on Transparency”, a resolution on transparency in pharmaceutical markets passed at the World Health Assembly in May 2019. 

In September 2019, OTMeds published a « transparency checklist« , a document that according to us, brings together some of the essential information that must be available to the public regulator in order to assess the relevance of the price of a drug at the time of setting of its price. It has been used by several institutions. In October 2019, OTMeds proposed to French parliamentarians as well as to the government proposals for amendments and decrees so that France begins to implement at the national level the resolution on the transparency of the World Health Assembly in the framework of the social security finance bill. The Observatory obtained an amendment on the subject to be co-signed by France Insoumise and LREM, an unprecedented alliance which proves the value of the approach. Censored for formal reasons by the Constitutional Council, the amendment was adopted the following year following new work by the Observatory, as reported in this report by the World Health Organization (August 2021).

OTMeds has been invited by various institutions, research seminars, conferences in economics or intellectual property, to present our approach and the importance of the angle of transparency in preserving social protection systems. In France, we were heard by the Ministry of Europe and foreign affairs (2019), the Ministry of Health (2019), the CCNE (conseil consultatif national d’éthique) in June 2020 for its opinion n°135 on access to therapeutic innovations, by the Senate in November 2020 as part of the development of a bill creating a public drug center, by the National Assembly as part of the drug information mission, by the Institutional Review Board of the Institut Pasteur. Abroad, we were heard by parliamentarians from the German Bundestag around the Transparency resolution and the French amendment (February 2020) or the Belgian national ethics and bio-ethics council (March 2021).

OTMeds co-organized an event around the Transparency resolution and its applications with the Global Health Center in Geneva, in parallel with the World Health Assembly in May 2020. We also spoke at a session of the Fair Pricing Forum organized by the World Health Organization in April 2021. 

In October 2021, we published a report for the group « The left » at the European Parliament on the possible « relocation of pharmaceutical production in Europe ». 

In two years, we have produced more than a hundred press releases, position papers, information notes and op-eds (Le Monde, Libération, Le Figaro, A.O.C, Domani, L’humanité, The Lancet). 

Find out our main media interventions here.