The Ministry of Health decided to increase the secrecy of its stocks. The government argues that the data can be used by the industry to speculate prices on sales to the SUS (Sistema Único de Saúde).
With this, the portfolio led by Minister Marcelo Queiroga will keep information about expired products hidden. In September 2021, the Sheet showed that Health saved R$ 243 million in medicines, vaccines, tests and other expired items.
The secrecy of the entire stock would fall next year, but reserve general Ridauto Fernandes, director of Health Logistics, signed a new term for classifying the information on April 20.
With this, there is no longer a date for the entire stock to be revealed. Information will be protected for two years from when it is produced.
Secrecy also extends to data on the volume of products out of stock.
The federal government has been criticized for imposing secrecy on information sensitive to the management of Jair Bolsonaro (PL), such as the list of authorities who access the Planalto Palace.
The term signed by the general determines to hide “database information (stock of Strategic Health Supplies and data on their movement)”.
The data on the Health stock was classified as “reserved” in the document and the complete justification for this is also under secrecy.
Fernandes told Sheet that one of the ideas is to prevent the industry from using inventory data to charge more.
“If the person who is going to sell me knows that I am desperate to buy, for example, because the product is running out, the price goes there in the cloud”, said the general of the reserve.
“When I negotiate prices, information on stock is worth gold,” he said.
In the classification term, Saúde cites excerpts from an article from the Access to Information Law (12,527/2011) on data “essential for the security of society or the State” to justify secrecy.
The points cited state that stock data can put the life, safety or health of the population at risk; offer a high risk to the country’s financial, economic or monetary stability; and jeopardize the safety of institutions or high national or foreign authorities and their families.
Fernandes said that informing the total value of the expired stock of Saúde could also end up supplying the industry.
“You will be able to make the ‘less account’ of the total stock. A bank manager does not say how much he has in his branch”, said the Director of Logistics.
He did not inform the current value of the volume expired and stored in the Health.
He only said that the ministry works with control bodies to “avoid this kind of thing”. “Today our inventory is significantly lower than last year,” she said, without giving the figure.
Health stocks have been confidential since 2018. The initial period was 5 years. In 2023, the entire volume would be revealed.
Fernandes said that the new dynamic, of imposing two years of secrecy from the production of data, is more suited to the legislation.
The Ministry of Health used this new classification term on April 11 to reject a request made by the Sheet via LAI (Access to Information Law) on the total expired stock of pulp.
Data on these products is easily obtained from the Ministry of Health’s internal systems, used only by authorized servers.
The main storage center for Saúde is in Guarulhos (SP).
as showed the SheetHealth kept 3.7 million items without validity in 2021 in this center. The data was obtained from internal reports of the folder.
The list of expired products included, for example, 820 thousand insulin pens, purchased for R$ 10 million and sufficient for 235 thousand patients with diabetes for a month.
The Bolsonaro government also lost vials for the application of 12 million vaccines for flu, BCG, hepatitis B (almost 6 million doses), chickenpox, among other diseases.
The list revealed by Sheet it also pointed out expired products that could serve SUS patients with hepatitis C, cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, tuberculosis, rare diseases, schizophrenia, rheumatoid arthritis, transplant recipients and people with kidney problems, among other situations.
Expired products must be incinerated, according to sanitary rules in Brazil. Health also has expenses in this process, carried out by a private company.
In some cases, such as when the product fails or when it is supplied with a short shelf life, the government is able to replace the stock expired by contractual agreements with the manufacturers.
This operation, however, can delay treatments. In addition, there are situations of damage to public coffers and patients.
In the case of insulin pens, data for 2021 indicated that Saúde did not deliver around 20% of the debut purchase of this product in the SUS, made in 2018.
The director of Logistics at Saíde told Sheet that the department is preparing an ordinance with guidelines on how to avoid the loss of products at the end of their shelf life.
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