Kuzminykh counts "his own way" again: did the calculator fail, or does the manipulation game continue?
Kyiv • UNN
People's Deputy Serhiy Kuzminykh overstates the number of violations in drug pricing, contradicting official data from the State Service of Ukraine for Food Safety and Consumer Protection. Most inspections were conducted based on complaints, which distorts the overall market picture.
Serhiy Kuzminykh, head of the subcommittee on pharmacy and pharmaceutical activities of the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian Parliament) Committee on National Health, Medical Assistance, and Medical Insurance, known for his ability to see "marketing schemes" on every pharmacy shelf and confuse geolocation with conspiracy, now seems to have decided to rewrite official statistics as well. The MP is trying to manipulate data from the State Service of Ukraine on Food Safety and Consumer Protection, UNN reports.
“Every fourth pharmacy inspection reveals pricing violations for medicines,”
And in confirmation, he cited statistics according to which, as of March 1, 2025, the State Service of Ukraine on Food Safety and Consumer Protection conducted over 1150 unscheduled inspections of pharmacies and establishments selling medicinal products. Almost a third of them, as Kuzminykh claims, revealed violations.
But wait, one-fourth is 25%, and one-third is already 33%. So which number is correct, Mr. Kuzminykh? It seems that in pursuit of betrayal or conspiracy, the MP uses all methods, including manipulation of figures.
Let's move on. The MP is spreading alarm, saying that the scale of pricing violations is enormous.
However, according to Andriy Kreitor, deputy head of the State Service of Ukraine on Food Safety and Consumer Protection, these 353 violations account for more than 30% of the total number of control measures conducted over the last almost four months.
“Over the last almost four months, the service’s specialists conducted hundreds of inspections in the sphere of medicine circulation — and found 353 violations. This accounts for more than 30% of the total number of control measures,” Kreitor noted.
But Kuzminykh, apparently, lives in his own temporal and arithmetic dimension: for him, these figures have somehow already become proof of a "large-scale problem."
Another interesting point: most inspections (777 out of 1150) were conducted based on citizen complaints. This means that not random pharmacies were checked, but those that already had complaints and violations, so finding violations there was expected. But this does not mean that the entire pharmaceutical market operates this way.
It seems that the deputy's favorite pastime is to take a combination of numbers and present them as an "alarming picture," as with the non-payment of taxes by pharmaceutical market players. The MP regularly, under the guise of fighting "dishonest pharmacies," tries to promote messages that benefit large factories that want to shift responsibility for high prices solely onto retail.
At the same time, Kuzminykh, as always, for some reason remains silent about the fact that 72% of a drug's price is formed by the manufacturer.