In the tenth batch of national procurement, aspirin has become the focus.

The core reason is that in this batch of centralized procurement, the price of enteric-coated aspirin tablets is as low as 3 cents a piece. The market is worried that excessive pursuit of low prices in centralized procurement may hurt companies, after all, this will affect profits; at the same time, it may also cause drug quality problems, and some media even lead the rhythm: "Do you dare to take drugs that cost 3 cents a piece in centralized procurement?"

The market's concerns are understandable, but most of the emotions may be redundant.

First of all, due to the simple synthesis process and cheap raw materials, the cost of aspirin itself is not high. In Europe and the United States, the unit price of aspirin is basically in "cents". The article "What is the level of 3 cents a piece of aspirin?" published by Huaxin New Drug Public Account mentioned that you can buy a regular aspirin tablet (0.01 US dollars/tablet) at Walgreens for 1 cent; you can buy a tablet of enteric-coated aspirin for 3 cents. Bayer's original drug is not expensive, 9 cents per tablet. Therefore, the price of aspirin in China is "normal".

Secondly, the price reduction of the centralized procurement is indeed very large. But strictly speaking, this is not to suppress pharmaceutical companies in an disorderly manner, but to return the profits of generic drugs to a reasonable level. The article "What is the level of aspirin at 3 cents per tablet?" pointed out that dapagliflozin (4.36 yuan), which was famous for its soul-bargaining in the past, still has an annual sales volume of 7 billion in China. This is the case for generic drugs worldwide. It is just that the domestic pricing was not normal in the past, and now it seems abnormal under the normal logic.

As for the market's concerns about the effects of generic drugs, the regulatory authorities are also controlling them through consistency evaluation and other means. Under normal circumstances, the quality is controllable, so there is no need to worry too much. Of course, how to ensure the controllability of the long-term effects of centralized procurement drugs is the direction that the regulatory authorities need to continue to work hard.

Supervision and even criticism of supervision are positive for promoting the development of the industry, but unwarranted pace will only cause harm to the entire pharmaceutical industry.

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