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Exclusive | Hong Kong can attract pharmaceutical giants by having own drug regulatory system, health chief says while citing need for R&D in Covid aftermath
- Health secretary Lo Chung-mau says firms are often spurred to carry out research where a regulator is based
- Looking back at first year as health minister, he defends fine-tuning pandemic controls, saying ‘small steps are in fact the safest way of walking’
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A key lesson Hong Kong should learn from the Covid-19 pandemic is the need to radically boost its research and development capabilities and consider setting up its own drug regulatory approval system, the health minister said, as he outlined his plans to transform the city into a biomedical innovation hub.
Giving the city a powerful body that could approve products for the market would also attract pharmaceutical firms that often carried out research where the regulator was based, Lo Chung-mau told the Post on Wednesday.
Looking back over his first year as health secretary, the veteran surgeon also said he had reached some targets, including devising measures to tackle the pandemic that were firmly rooted in evidence.
While that approach led to incremental changes, steady transitions were crucial to ensure the city emerged from the pandemic, he argued.
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“Some people said Hong Kong walked out of the pandemic with tiny steps. But small steps are in fact the safest way of walking,” Lo said. “Do you run on slippery floors? No. Fighting the pandemic is like walking on a slippery floor where you can fall down anytime.”
When severe acute respiratory syndrome, or Sars, hit Hong Kong in 2003, authorities responded by placing residents in isolation and quarantine, Lo noted. But the virus behind Covid-19 mutated quickly, so additional measures such as early genome sequencing and the timely development of vaccines and antivirals were helpful in returning the city to normality, he said.
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