Far from doomsday for pharma sector

Confirmation by Pfizer that it is cutting a further 150 jobs at its Newbridge plant triggered widespread calls for action to address what Fianna Fáil's jobs spokesman Dara Calleary called "an emerging crisis in the healthcare sector".

His counterpart in Sinn Féin, Jonathan O’Brien, spoke of a “need for the Government to adopt a workable strategy and investment plan to secure quality jobs in the pharmaceutical sector”. And it’s easy to see why. In the past week, three stalwarts of the Irish life sciences sector – Pfizer, Baxter and MSD – have announced the loss of 830 manufacturing jobs between them.

Easy, but wrong.

Certainly it’s been a bad week on the jobs front in the sector – especially for a Government banking heavily on its strategy for jobs growth.And job losses in the Taoiseach’s constituency always give Opposition an easy target.

But the job losses at Pfizer, and at MSD, are not the harbinger of a new and deadly threat to the health of a key sector of the economy. They are attributable, more prosaically, to the ongoing fallout of the wave of megamergers that shook up Big Pharma in 2009 and to drug companies’ efforts to reconfigure operations globally in the face of declining revenues due to the the well-flagged impact of the expiry of patents on a number of blockbuster drugs.

Pfizer has been conducting a series of global reviews of different elements of its business in recent years. That has seen it close four manufacturing sites in Ireland over the last three years as well as well as selling its nutritionals and animal health businesses.

And it has cut employment at Newbridge in half.

But it has also announced a €100 million investment in its Grange Castle biologics facility and €30 million in its active ingredients unit in Ringaskiddy. And, Newbridge, despite its woes, is in line for additional work over the coming years – with the company’s Latin America spokeswoman disclosing that some of the solid dose operations of a plant in Puerto Rico, whose closure was announced last month, coming to the Kildare site.

Of the plants it has closed, Pfizer and IDA Ireland have secured buyers for Dún Laoghaire (biotech giant Amgen), Shanbally (biopharma group Biomarin), Loughbeg (contract manufacturer Hovione). Even its older Little Island plant is understood to have attracted greater interest than expected.

Pharmaceutical manufacturing in Ireland is certainly in transition and some work will disappear for good, but it’s too early for a doomsday scenario.