A Calgary pharmacist is welcoming the Alberta Government’s procurement of five million bottles of children’s pain and fever medication as demand skyrockets and pharmacies struggle to fill their shelves.
“I think the government is doing its best, so I think they should keep working and bring more stock,” said Mubeen Sadiq, pharmacist and owner of the Pharmedic Pharmacy on Macleod Trail S.W.
Sadiq said right now, his pharmacy is managing with the supply it has, but he would still like to see more.
“We have about 15 bottles sitting here. We have generic Tylenol, we have brand Tylenol,” he said.
Sadiq’s pharmacy is also able to do compounding, meaning it can customize and make its own medication — a process many other qualified pharmacies have turned to as they deal with supply shortages.
CTV News spoke to 10 pharmacies in Calgary on Tuesday.
About half say they have some supply, while the rest say they have nothing and don’t know when they’ll get more.
On Tuesday, Premier Danielle Smith and Health Minister Jason Copping announced their government has secured five million bottles of children’s acetaminophen and ibuprofen that will be distributed across the province and any extra will be shared with the rest of the country.
The supplier, Turkey-based Atabay Pharmaceutical and Fine Chemicals, has sold to dozens of markets in Europe and around the world.
Health Canada still needs to approve the medication.
“Once approvals are in place, which should only be a few weeks, the medication will be sent to us in a number of shipments. When a shipment is received, the bottles will be available for ordering by pharmacies across the province and distributed within a couple days,” Copping said.
Just last month, Health Canada began importing and distributing one million bottles of children’s pain reliever medication to hospitals, pharmacies and other retailers across the country.
“There is now a supply of Tylenol in the province and pharmacists are predominantly mostly keeping it behind the counter so that they can interact with each parent or patient that is seeking it and do proper patient assessment,” said Margaret Wing, CEO of the Alberta Pharmacists’ Association.
However, Wing says it’s still not enough to meet the demand here and across the country, but she hopes this new procurement will be.
The province is expecting to pay a premium for the five million bottles and will subsidize the cost so that pharmacies can sell them at the “average retail price.”
The total cost to taxpayers hasn’t been set.
“We want to make sure parents have access to the medication that they need because if (children) can’t break the fever, they end up in the hospital rooms and that is what’s causing the pressure on our hospitals, not here but across the country,” Smith said.
Some, including the Alberta NDP, call this a step in the right direction, but say more needs to be done.
Dr. Joe Vipond, an emergency room physician in Calgary, said the medication will be a relief to families, but it won’t ease the pressure on hospitals.
“Kids are being admitted to the hospital because they’re sick. They’re sick with sepsis, they’re sick with respiratory failure, they can’t breathe and no amount of painkiller or anti-fever medication is going to fix that,” he told CTV News.
A political commentator says the Alberta government is also showing what it can do without Ottawa.
“This could fit into that larger narrative of the Alberta government sort of talking about what Alberta can and should be doing for itself and sort of being critical of the federal government for not being able to accomplish as much,” said Lori Williams.
“I don’t think parents care which government is acting to help treat illnesses and their children – all they care about is the health and welfare of their children.”
Convicted murderer Daniel Jolivet, in prison for the past 30 years, has maintained his innocence since the day he was arrested. W5 reviews the evidence he painstakingly assembled while behind bars. W5's documentary 'Buried Evidence' airs Saturday at 7 p.m. on CTV.
The massive white orb drifting across U.S. airspace has triggered a diplomatic maelstrom and is blowing up on social media. A look at what's known about the balloon crossing the U.S. and what isn't.
The oldest preserved vertebrate brain has been found in a 319-million-year-old fossilized fish skull that was removed from an English coal mine over a century ago.
In the field of cancer treatment, nothing is more important than diagnosing and treating the problem as quickly as possible — but according to new survey data, about one in four Canadian cancer patients report that they are still experiencing cancelled or postponed appointments.
A train derailment and resulting large fire prompted an evacuation order and a declaration of a state of emergency in an Ohio village near the Pennsylvania state line on Friday night, covering the area in billows of smoke lit orange by the flames below.
An Edmonton man who received a ticket from the city under the phase 2 residential parking ban earlier this week says his street has finally been plowed — five days after his vehicle was ticketed.
Marc, Seth and Zacary James are the Melisizwe Brothers, and they performed at Jasper Place High School on Friday as part of Edmonton Public School Black History Month celebrations.
Technology in Alberta that is expected to allow doctors to more accurately and effectively treat cancerous tumours with radiation enters clinical trials next week.
A man who took part in four traffic-stopping protests in Metro Vancouver in an effort to save old-growth forests has been given a conditional sentence and six months' probation by a provincial court judge.
The mayors of Port Coquitlam and Port Moody want Nav Canada — the organization that creates flight paths for airports across the country — to pause its plans for a new YVR arrivals route that will direct many large airplanes over their communities.
With all of the Maritimes still under extreme cold warnings Saturday morning, more than 34,000 households and businesses are without power, as of 11 a.m.
The first North Atlantic right whale to be entangled in connection to Canada’s lobster fishery in over five years has been successfully rescued by marine mammal rescue responders in the United States.
A man who took part in four traffic-stopping protests in Metro Vancouver in an effort to save old-growth forests has been given a conditional sentence and six months' probation by a provincial court judge.
An emergency room doctor on Vancouver Island is calling on the leadership of the health authority to resign, saying harassment by Island Health officials is prompting doctors to abandon the region amid a critical shortage of health-care workers.
After being charged with speeding by a city-operated photo radar device, a Toronto family was able to successfully fight the charge in court largely due to one small detail.
Torontonians appear to be returning downtown in greater numbers but the pace of the city’s economic recovery still lags behind many other North American cities, a new study suggests.
Residents from Quebec to Newfoundland and Labrador are waking up this morning to more extreme cold weather. Emergency officials warned people to seek shelter and monitor for frostbite if they had to be outside overnight, as the temperature across much of Eastern Canada was expected to feel like -40 C to -50 C with the wind chill.
A Quebec university study found that nearly three years of the pandemic have had an effect on the travel habits of Quebecers: even with the partial or complete lifting of restrictions, they increasingly prefer to travel at home. The most recent Cahier des tendances published by the Transat Chair in Tourism at the École des sciences de la gestion de l'UQAM revealed that inflation and health measures hurt many Quebecers.
Waterloo regional police issued a robbery warning Thursday evening after they said two convenience stores and a restaurant in Kitchener were robbed within a 30 minute span.
The suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that was found floating over sensitive military sites in the western United States had been tracked by Canada's government since last weekend as it passed through Canadian airspace, sources tell CTV News.
After months of driving around the city with an advertisement for a kidney donor on her bright red car, Debbie Onishenko will soon be able to rip off the decals as her search has ended.
An investigation that lasted almost two years has resulted in moose hunting violation convictions for six people and a lodge in Red Lake in northwestern Ontario.
Convicted murderer Daniel Jolivet, in prison for the past 30 years, has maintained his innocence since the day he was arrested. W5 reviews the evidence he painstakingly assembled while behind bars. W5's documentary 'Buried Evidence' airs Saturday at 7 p.m. on CTV.
Winnipeg police released a new image of a 31-year-old woman who has been missing since early last year on Friday in the hope it may generate new information on her whereabouts.
A fire destroyed a popular paint and hobby shop in Winkler Thursday afternoon with black smoke prompting Winkler police to close off a stretch of Highway 32 for more than an hour.
Saskatchewan is reacting to the removal of controversial amendment G4 to Bill C-21 by the federal Liberals, which banned certain semi-automatic rifles and shotguns.
