Frontier injustice: the American threat to Canada’s drug supply
Bibliographic record
Abstract
"Import-from-Canada" strategies to address high prices for patented pharmaceuticals are gaining momentum in the United States. In the first two months of 2019 alone, five congressional bills incorporating such strategies were introduced; these bills have attracted bipartisan support across the fractious American political divide. At the same time, Canadian lawmakers continue their long-standing failure to take action in response to the looming threat of having Canada's drug supply siphoned off by its more powerful neighbour. Unregulated bulk importation of pharmaceuticals originally intended for the Canadian market into the USA would lead to severe drug shortages that would undermine the Canadian health system, while also halting emerging moves towards universal Canadian pharmacare in their tracks. At the same time, this short-term approach to tackling American pricing woes would fail to heal the deep systemic issues that underpin unaffordable drug prices in the USA. This article underscores the need for Canada to take action to protect its supply of patented medicines, and suggests possible forms such action might take.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".