As Western countries continue to ratchet up sanctions and boycotts against Russia, the country's citizens are panic-buying medicines, such as antidepressants, sleeping pills, and contraceptives,
according to Reuters.
Between February 28 and March 13, Russians bought 270.5 million pharmaceutical items worth about $104 billion, according to sales data compiled for the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti. That two weeks' worth of buying was comparable to what Russians bought at pharmacies for the entire month of January, which saw purchases of 280 million pharmaceutical items.
The analysis, carried out by Russian analytics company DSM Group, found that demand increased sharply for medicines, including antidepressants, sleeping pills, insulin, cancer and heart drugs, hormones, and contraceptives.
The surge is due to "fear," Sergei Shulyak, general director of DSM Group, told Reuters. "The first fear was that everything could get more expensive," he said, "and the second fear was that medicines they need won't be available in some time. Those fears moved people. They stood in lines at pharmacies and bought everything."
While Western countries and high-profile companies, such as Apple and McDonald's, have imposed various punishing economic sanctions and boycotts, the pharmaceutical industry has largely resisted cutting Russians off. Many drug makers—and some ethicists—say that pharmaceutical companies have a humanitarian obligation to continue supplying vulnerable patients in the country with life-saving drugs, such as insulin, cancer therapies, cardiovascular drugs, and products for infants and pregnancy.
Earlier this month,
Pfizer released a statement saying that it would "maintain humanitarian supply of medicines to Russians and donate all proceeds to providing direct humanitarian support to the people of Ukraine." In
a March 13 interview on CBS's Face the Nation, Pfizer CEO Alberta Bourla elaborated, saying that the company's activity in Russia accounted for "maybe less than half a percent of our total revenue," but that war-time restrictions "don't apply to medicines because it's about lives."
"How can you say, 'I'm not going to send the cancer medicines to Russians because of what they did?'" he said.