Since hospitals began mandatory reporting of all serious adverse drug reactions, the numbers have skyrocketed, according to newly released figures. Blacklock's Reporter says the equirement stems from Vanessa’s Law, a 2014 parliamentary mandate named after an Ontario schoolgirl who died from an ordinary prescription medication.“In December 2019, serious adverse drug reaction reporting became mandatory for hospitals,” stated a Department of Health report. “Hospital reporting increased from 1.3% of all reports to 9%.”The report, titled Evaluation Of The Pharmaceutical Drugs Program, noted that “since Vanessa’s Law came into force, 16,520 serious adverse drug reactions were reported to the Department of Health by Canadian hospitals,” with 678 of these cases being fatal.Parliament passed Bill C-17, An Act To Amend The Food & Drugs Act, in 2014, expanding cabinet powers to ban the sale of prescription drugs posing an “imminent risk of injury to health.” By 2017, regulations mandated that hospitals report all serious adverse drug reactions.“Since the mid-1990s, all annual adverse drug reaction reports have increased from 4,000 to more than 80,000,” the report said. “Serious adverse drug reactions have increased from 1,500 to more than 60,000 per year.”Bill C-17 was named Vanessa’s Law in honor of Vanessa Young, a 15-year-old from Oakville, Ont., who died of heart failure in 2000 after being prescribed Johnson & Johnson’s Prepulsid for a digestive disorder. The drug was withdrawn from the Canadian market five months after her death.Vanessa’s father, then-Conservative MP Terence Young (Oakville, Ont.), sponsored the Act. “Twenty-seven drugs have been pulled off the Canadian market since 1997 for injuring and killing patients,” Young told the Commons in 2014. “Prepulsid is one.”“Neither Vanessa nor we, her parents, were given any warning that the drug was already responsible for 80 deaths,” Young said. “The drug industry representatives who infest Parliament Hill love to talk about when doctors make errors or patients take too much of a drug. What they never talk about is when a drug used the right way kills or injures a patient.”“The facts of this tragedy shock every layperson who hears them, yet I was to quickly discover the insiders — doctors, researchers, and people at Big Pharma — were never shocked,” Young continued. “They knew all along that potentially life-threatening drugs were being pushed on patients with non-life-threatening conditions as the drug business had become all about Wall Street.”“They have power and influence,” Young added. “They are some of the wealthiest companies in the world and have no loyalty to any country. But above all else, despite the thousands of deaths, no Big Pharma executive has ever gone to jail.”The Evaluation report described Canada as the world’s ninth-largest prescription drug market. “From 2011 to 2019, the value of total sales, including non-patented, over-the-counter medicines, increased by 35 percent to $29.9 billion,” it said.
