The Pharmacy Guild of Australia used patient phone numbers collected through its COVID-19 vaccination booking website to send text messages attacking the Federal Government, a senior health bureaucrat has alleged. 

The guild has been fighting against the impending 60-day dispensing policy, which will let patients collect double quantities of common prescription medications but therefore halve the dispensing fees paid to pharmacies.

After the announcement, patients began to receive emails titled ‘How Australia’s medicine shortages will affect you and your family’, according to Labor Senator Anne Urquhart, who raised the subject at a Senate hearing on Friday.

She said her constituents who received emails then received text messages directing them to the guild’s Essential Medicine Shortages website, which warns “everyone will suffer” under the 60-day dispensing policy.