Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The HSE national drugs committee and the HSE as a body corporate is always open to pharmaceutical companies to make new applications or revise applications. Members may be interested to know that Alexion as a company has a revenue of €1.15 billion, had profits of €253 million and equity of €2.4 billion. The chief executive officer of the company is paid €12 million a year. In Belgium in 2013, politicians of Government and Opposition alike alleged that the company was guilty of moral blackmail when it was discovered byDe Standaard, a newspaper in that country, that Alexion had hired a PR company to help a nine-year old child who was denied the drug by the Belgian authorities.

The parents of the boy believed that they were being helped by a patients' organisation and were not told that a PR company was behind it. That is the kind of thing we are dealing with in these cases.