22 October 2018 - The story of how Remicade became Canada’s most lucrative drug with sales topping $1.1-billion – told masterfully by Globe and Mail health reporter Kelly Grant – has many sick-making elements.

The drug’s maker, Janssen, among other things:

• Set up stand-alone infusion clinics, and sponsored infusion clinics in hospitals
  
• Mounted a massive PR blitz to undermine a competing drug, Inflectra, a biosimilar that is roughly half the price
  
• Wooed individual provinces with deep discounts to entice them away from a national alliance seeking to negotiate a lower price
  
• Offered the first doses of Remicade to hospitals for as little as a penny in a bid to get them to get new patients using it instead of Inflectra
  
• Created a support program to help patients get insurers, private and public, to pay for the drug
  
• Funded patient advocacy groups, but cut them off if they supported switching to biosimilars
  

After perusing that list, hating big pharma is easy.

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