Welcome to yet another edition, chief!

In today’s edition — The recent tragedy involving a deadly cough syrup that killed several children is yet another reminder of how little we value a human life. Quality checks in India are more bureaucratic than scientific. But if you think this happens only in India, we introduce you to an investigative report about European doctors — some of them convicted of sexual assault — thriving in another country because there is no common system that flags them. 

A Crisis Born of Negligence

Vishwas Ved

India’s caught up in another medical mess, this time over a cough syrup called Coldrif. It’s been linked to the deaths of several children, and now a bunch of states have banned the syrup and launched criminal investigations.

Early reports point to a toxic industrial solvent as the cause, the same kind that killed several children in other parts of the world in earlier years. 

The Maharashtra FDA has confirmed contamination, and the UP government has suspended senior officials, but the bigger issue isn’t just a bad batch of syrup. It’s the question of how such a product made it to pharmacy shelves in the first place. 

India’s ‘chalta hai’ regulatory framework — where drug controllers often lack resources, authority, and sometimes also the will — creates gaps wide enough for negligence and malpractice to slip through. 

Quality checks in the country are more bureaucratic than scientific, and the enforcement of rules is more procedural than effective.

This time, though, the negligence and resulting chaos has been nauseating. One government agency said the samples were clean, while a state lab found nearly 50% diethylene glycol in the same batch. 

Doctors have been blamed for prescribing the syrup, even arrested in some cases, while those responsible for making and certifying it are still ‘under inquiry’.

There is also another angle to the problem when it comes to Indians and pharmaceutical products. Culturally, we are guilty of taking liberty with medicines and medicating way too easily, helping create an unregulated demand.

That constant, unquestioning demand in a way leads to manufacturers chasing volume, regulators in a rush to tick boxes, and safety becoming a casualty.

Echo from Europe

Many of us would be inclined to think that the medical system is more broken in a third-world country like India than in the first-world universe. 

But an investigative report published by Follow the Money just a week ago tells a story about Europe which mirrors India’s problem in a different yet related context.

According to the report, across Europe, doctors banned for serious medical malpractice and crimes such as sexual assault are able to keep practising by moving to another country. 

The investigations reveal that one Bernhard Scheja, a doctor in Zurich, was convicted of sexual assault and banned from practising in Switzerland for conducting an unnecessary vaginal examination on an 18-year-old. Later, Scheja resurfaced as a registered doctor in Düsseldorf, Germany.

This unchecked movement of these tainted doctors has been attributed to a weak information-sharing system between countries with porous borders and relaxed immigration regulations.

More than 100 such cases were found, involving practitioners who had been barred in one nation but easily registered in another. 

The comparison with India’s drug oversight is natural. In both cases, regulators depend heavily on local systems that often don’t interact with each other. 

Europe’s medical warning mechanism, the IMI alert system, was designed to prevent exactly this kind of cross-border risk. But auditors found that many countries barely use it. 

Likewise, in India, the system is flawed where drug oversight is split between centre and states, with neither fully in control. The Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation handles approvals for new drugs and imports, while states oversee manufacturing and sales. 

But in practice, this setup blurs lines because state inspectors issue manufacturing licences, yet the centre dictates standards. That confusion means no one takes full ownership when things go wrong.

Procedures vs. Human Lives

In India, children lost their lives because a batch of substandard syrup managed to reach them, while in Europe, patients have been assaulted or killed by doctors who are still practising in another country. 

Both stories are about a system that gives more priority to privacy and procedures than human lives. And both have one thing in common: lack of transparency. 

In India, details about faulty drugs or suspended licences rarely reach the public until tragedy strikes. Meanwhile, in Europe, regulators hide behind privacy laws and systems that do not interact with each other. 

What’s striking is how little accountability follows. Even as governments promise probes and committees, the structural flaws that brought about the tragedy stay the same. 

Final Words

The Coldrif tragedy and shenanigans of banned doctors in Europe are two separate stories, but essentially they point to a common failure. It’s what happens when bureaucrats stop caring and the systems start running on habit. 

The Indian pharmaceutical industry, often touted as the “pharmacy of the world”, is now haunted by repeated lapses — from Uzbekistan to Madhya Pradesh. It’s a matter of shame for the country.

And in Europe, where oversight is supposed to be airtight, the fact that a doctor banned in Switzerland could find work in Germany shows that the medical system is not all that great in first-world countries either.

Europe swears by its safety standards. But none of that means a thing if the people in charge treat it like paperwork. 

Rules don’t keep people safe, people do..

$18 Billion

That’s the amount Elon Musk's xAI is committing to buy hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs for its ‘Colossus 2’ data center in Memphis, marking the latest push to outpace rivals as local resistance stacks up. The first facility, known as Colossus, already runs more than 200,000 Nvidia chips to train the Grok AI model. Now, a second and even bigger complex— Colossus 2—is under construction alongside a dedicated natural-gas power plant designed to generate over a gigawatt of electricity. The goal is to scale faster than rivals like OpenAI and Google by securing chips, power, and space before anyone else can.

—Asthma inhalers produce same emissions as 500,000 cars. A new study reveals that inhalers used by asthma and COPD patients contribute significantly to global warming, producing emissions equivalent to over half a million cars annually in the US Researchers from UCLA and Harvard analysed inhaler usage between 2014-2024, finding that metered-dose inhalers, which use harmful propellants, accounted for 98% of the emissions. Over the decade, US inhalers released 24.9 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent. Experts stress the need for greener alternatives, noting that reducing emissions is achievable.

—OpenAI seals $1 trillion of deals this year. High-profile partnerships with tech giants like Oracle, Nvidia, CoreWeave, and AMD have pushed the value of OpenAI's dealmaking to $1 trillion this year alone. The ChatGPT maker has signed a string of blockbuster computing deals with other tech companies to power its AI infrastructure. The deals give OpenAI access to vast computing power, but the ultimate cost for the company could be staggering. Here's the breakdown of its $1 trillion worth of deals: AMD $270 billion, Nvidia $500 billion, Oracle $300 billion, and CoreWeave $22 billion.

—Tesla offers cheaper EVs to win back market share. Tesla rolled out new, cheaper versions of two of its electric car models this week in hopes the offerings will help revive flagging sales but investors dumped its stock anyway. The new Model Y, costing just under $40,000 with a stripped-down interior, comes in a brutal year for Tesla as it tries to attract more customers despite an aging lineup, stiff competition from foreign EV makers and anti-Elon Musk boycotts targeting the company. The reaction from the stock market after the news broke suggests the new models are not expected to help much. 

—Johnson & Johnson to pay $966 mn in talc lawsuit. A Los Angeles jury ordered Johnson & Johnson this week to pay $966 million to the family of a California woman who died from a rare and aggressive cancer, after the company was found liable in a lawsuit claiming its baby powder products cause cancer. The family of Mae Moore, the California woman who died in 2021, claimed that she developed mesothelioma, a rare cancer, after years of using the powder because it was contaminated with asbestos, a known carcinogen.

ICYMI | Tech the Shot

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