Officials describe early missteps that delayed treatment to critically ill patients
The Trump administration mishandled the initial distribution of the only approved coronavirusmedication, delaying treatment to some critically ill patients with covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, according to nine current and former senior administration officials.
The first tranche of 607,000 vials of the antiviral medication remdesivir, donated to the government by drugmaker Gilead Sciences, was distributed in early May — in some cases to the wrong hospitals, to hospitals with no intensive care units and therefore no eligible patients, and to facilities without the needed refrigeration to store it, meaning some had to be returned to the government, said the officials familiar with the distribution effort.
Demand for remdesivir soared after the National Institutes of Health announced on April 29 that a clinical trial had shown that hospitalized patients with advanced covid-19 who received the experimental drug recovered faster than similar patients who received a placebo. Two days later, the Food and Drug Administration, citing those results, approved the drug to treat severely ill patients. Continue reading.