Coronavirus Treatment: Remdesivir Arrives At Some Mass. Hospitals In Limited Supply
BOSTON (CBS) - In the race to find a treatment for COVID-19, a drug that's showing potential has reached some Massachusetts hospitals. It's called remdesivir and it's made by the California-based pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences Inc. The FDA approved the drug for emergency use on May 1st.
"Remdesivir is a broad spectrum antiviral agent, it targets viruses specifically," said Vice Chair of Emergency Medicine at Massachusetts General, Dr. Ali Raja. "It was initially developed for viruses like SARS or MERS but it never got approved for those."
Last week, the federal government announced it will get roughly 40% of Gilead's global donation of 1.5 million doses. And that over the next six weeks, "the 607,000 vials of the experimental drug will treat an estimated 78,000 hospitalized COVID-19 patients."
"This drug is promising and we want to get it to the American people and the areas that need it most," said White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
In a statement to WBZ-TV Gilead said: "This donation is our commitment to provide our existing supply of remdesivir at no cost for the treatment of patients with severe COVID-19 infection globally. Gilead will continue to work with health authorities to determine the appropriate allocation of available product supply for appropriate patients."
But the initial roll-out has drawn criticism from the Massachusetts legislature. In a letter to Vice President Mike Pence and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, Senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren, and Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, called out the administration writing: "Hospitals across the nation are reporting uneven distribution of remdesivir, with the drug going to hospitals with fewer COVID-19 patients than others."
HHS would later revise its plan announcing that state health departments would oversee the distribution to appropriate hospitals.
WBZ has learned MGH, North Shore Medical Center, Beth Israel and Boston Medical Center have received the drug.
"We already have 80 some odd patients in the hospital who are intubated with COVID and we don't have enough remdesivir for all of them," said Dr. Raja.
Raja says the limited supply will make for difficult choices on who, among the sickest of patients, gets the medication. "This really is a very hard decision at the end of the day. It's very patient specific and it relies on the doctors taking care of the patients to make that decision," Dr. Raja said.
But the jury's still out on whether remdesivir will work. MGH was one of the participating hospitals in a government sponsored clinical trial that resulted in the antiviral treatment getting FDA approval. Raja says experts are confident it's safe but remdesivir still remains an experimental drug. "Trial results should be coming out in a few days," said Raja. "They reportedly show there was an improvement in the mortality rate and the time it took patients to get better."
Raja added there are other clinical trials happening at MGH. Some of them include the use of convalescent plasma which "takes antibodies from patients who've had COVID and studies whether or not they can treat patients who have COVID."
MGH doctors are also using nitric oxide, which in the past has been used to treat high altitude sickness, to improve breathing in COVID-19 patients with severely damaged lungs.
"Routinely we're using oxygen, we're going to start using remdesivir in patients, especially under this emergency use authorization," Raja said. "But all the other drugs we're using, we're using as part of trials, they're not being used on every patient."
