“We’d be better off saying no. By paying these prices for Keytruda, the overall health of the population actually gets worse”
Beth Woods, Centre for Health Economics, University of York

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Chrissie here, stepping in for Franz while he’s at the International Journalism Conference in Italy.

I started at the Bureau in March 2020. My first day was a Tuesday, and by the Friday I was already more than a little circumspect about getting on the Tube. The following week, the office closed as the country went into lockdown. Launching a global health team (coincidentally, I should add) on the eve of the biggest pandemic in living memory was not something I had on my 2020 bingo card.

In some ways, though, it was serendipitous timing.

Covid presented unprecedented challenges to health systems and governments around the world. It also presented novel opportunities for grifters and fraudsters to profit from the misfortune of others – and gave investigative journalists endless stories to uncover. 

Unfortunately, I have to share the sad news this week that, after six years, our global health team is closing. The major funder of our health desk, the Gates Foundation, did not renew its support to us – nor many other media outlets. We are so sad to be losing great colleagues, and I worry about a world in which the support for fearless, independent journalism is so uncertain.

As a non-profit newsroom, we don’t have the financial security of advertising revenue or millionaire owners. That’s why we really need our readers to back us. You can become a member today, from just £5 a month. The support of our Bureau Insiders helps us plan for the long term and ensures that we can remain independent:

Since you’re reading Uncovered, you already know that we’re made of strong stuff here at the Bureau. We don’t give up and we won’t give in.

And in that spirit, this week, the global health team has published some of its most important work to date. So, let’s go…

On Monday, we published the results of one of our most in-depth health investigations ever.

As a proud part of ICIJ’s Cancer Calculus project, we worked with journalists from 37 countries to explore how pharma giant MSD keeps the price of its lifesaving cancer drug Keytruda high, leaving patients and health systems scrambling to afford it. You can read our reporting into the true cost of Keytruda to the NHS and the patients that rely on it here. It’s a result of stunning, detailed work by Fiona Walker and Andjela Milivojevic.

This global investigation is already making waves.

In Finland, Belgium and the Netherlands, members of parliament have been asking questions relating to the stories. In Mexico, the Ministry of Health confirmed it had activated alerts and recall mechanisms, in a statement responding to reporting around counterfeit versions of the drug.

And if you’re a fan of reading the WhatsApp exchanges of Peter Mandelson, we exposed the workings of the secret new £64bn pharmaceuticals deal agreed between the UK and the US. 

This deal has immense implications for public health: researchers have projected it could cost more lives than Covid. Yet parliament has not been allowed to review the terms. Activists and journalists have been denied freedom of information requests for key details. We have a simple question: how has the government been able to make a deal that bypasses democratic scrutiny?

To push for clarity, we have submitted our findings to several parliamentary committees, including the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, which has signalled it wants to scrutinise the deal further. SNP MP Seamus Logan also shared our story publicly, calling for the government to release key documents.

Campaign groups Just Treatment and Global Justice Now have also sent evidence from our story to MPs ahead of a parliamentary debate on 27 April.

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan addressed the Cambridge Disinformation Summit at King’s College earlier this month. Just minutes in, he mentioned the Bureau.

“Like many of you, I’ve become convinced that disinformation is one of, if not the defining challenges of our time,” he began. “To explain why, I think that I want to start with just a couple of stories that have shocked Londoners in recent times.” One of these two stories highlighted was our very own investigation revealing the King of Slop.

You remember, right? In November we showed how Geeth Sooriyapura, a Sri Lankan influencer, claims to have made $300,000 running Facebook pages, including some that push racist, Islamophobic and anti-migrant posts aimed at British audiences.

“I’ve asked my team in City Hall to lead a coordinated effort to expose the people pushing lies about London and debunk the dangerous narratives they're spreading,” Khan continued. “We’re bringing disinformation out of the confusion of darkness and into the clarity of daylight.”

Sounds like we have something in common, Mr Mayor. 

On Thursday this week, another prominent figure from our tech reporting – AI-generated rapper Danny Bones – was being discussed on Bellingcat’s Stage Talks podcast. Wonder if he’s going to write a clap-back rap about that? You can catch the episode with our reporter Effie Webb here.

It’s gratifying to see our work being shared in the places where it can really contribute to meaningful, positive change in the world. We’re now in touch with the Mayor’s team to see how we might support these efforts. 

Keep your eyes open for some more too-weird-to-be-true reveals from the Big Tech team coming very soon. And let us know if you see anything online that you think we should be investigating.

Each week we reveal a fascinating fact from our reporting…

We phoned the UK's tax authority, HMRC, to report Roman Abramovich for tax avoidance.

HMRC made a post on LinkedIn offering rewards for turning in suspected tax cheats. Our investigation last year revealed Roman Abramovich could owe the UK taxman as much as £1bn. So, our editor-in-chief Franz Wild gave them a call.

Watch our editor-in-chief make the phone call here.

One of our earliest health investigations was about the overstretched, secret supply chain of a drug vital for keeping Covid patients comfortable in ICU. Over the six years since, much of our work has been asking important questions about the vaccines, drugs and medicines that keep us healthy and alive – who can get them? Where do they come from? And are they safe and effective? 

Through the years, we’ve heard the same story over and over again: patients desperate for help but struggling to get medicine. Or worse, the drugs actually cause them harm. 

Paul Eccles spoke to one mother living this nightmare. “Even though she had that illness, she seemed so cheerful,” says Yohana.

She’s talking about her daughter Valery Javiana Fernández Rivas. Valery was diagnosed with leukemia in 2018 and had been undergoing chemotherapy in northern Colombia. Things looked positive. After more than a year of treatment, six-year-old Valery was due to be switched to a course of tablets. But the next round of chemo – an injection of methotrexate – changed everything. 

As Paul writes: “The injections had always been tough, but this time something was different. Valery screamed in pain and vomited in her hospital bed. Four days later she was in a coma. Just over two weeks after that, she was dead.” 

Valery’s autopsy revealed a bacterium called Pseudomonas aeruginosa in her blood. It is particularly dangerous for people with weakened immune systems, such as cancer patients. 

She wasn’t alone. Three other children died in 2020 after being given cancer drugs made by the same Indian company, Naprod. What is heartbreaking is that the Colombian drug regulator had found Naprod’s drugs to be contaminated but ordered a recall only once it was too late. 

Naprod continues to export medicines around the world – including to Colombia.

Six years on, Yohana is still waiting for answers. 

Despite calls for justice for the children and their families, little has happened since the deaths. Investigations in Colombia have gone nowhere. The company that made the drug has faced no sanction and its cancer drugs continue to be exported around the world. 

Naprod did not even answer our questions.

It’s almost impossible to imagine the heartbreak that Yohana and the other parents are facing. For their pain to be compounded by a lack of justice and people taking accountability is unspeakably bleak. It makes me furious. 

Now, if you’ll indulge me for a second, I want to say thank you to all of the incredibly committed, talented and tenacious health journalists that have been part of the Bureau. We’ll miss you.

And we will make sure that your work continues to hold these dodgy companies, toothless regulators and shameless grifters to account.