During the coronavirus outbreak in Texas this summer, Dr. Thomas Patterson said he only had enough remdesivir, an antiviral drug, for about a third of his patients, and he was forced to decide who would get the only one. legal drugs in the United States. States to treat Covid-19.
Meanwhile, Dr. Ahmedul Kabir in Bangladesh has a lot.
“We have no shortage of remdesivir in our hospitals,” said Kabir, professor of medicine at Dhaka Medical College. “Bangladesh is a third country in the world and we have sufficient quantities. It is unexpected that the United States does not do this. There deserves a lot of remdesivir out there.
CNN’s remdesivir survey reveals that doctors in several emerging countries are reporting giant materials for the drug, while American patients have faced a shortage, even as the drug is manufactured through an American pharmaceutical company and evolved with help from US tax dollars.
“The government funded it and patients in hospitals like ours couldn’t get it,” said Patterson, chief of the infectious disease department at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio.
At a press convention on Tuesday, doctors, lawyers and a congressman accused Trump’s management of failing to secure a larger offer to remdesivir.
“Some whose suffering can simply be reduced and hospitalization shortened do not get relief from Trump’s refusal to act,” said Texas Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett in a statement. “We may just temporarily build the source if Trump is late in leadership. “
In an email to CNN, a spokesman for the US Department of Health and Human Services defended that the president remdesivir.
“President Trump puts American patients first and his leadership has secured more than 90% of Gilead’s publicity source on this life-saving treatment,” the spokesperson wrote, referring to the California pharmaceutical company. that manufactures remdesivir.
Data submitted through Gilead Sciences to the US Food and Drug Administration does not show that remdesivir saves lives. On the contrary, it shows that the drug shortens the hospital stay, on average, from 15 to 11 days for patients with severe Covid-19. The FDA gave Gilead emergency clearance to remdesivir in May on the data.
The drug costs $ 2,340 for a five-day course of treatment and US hospitals don’t buy it outright as they do other drugs. Since there is enough for everyone, HHS makes sure that remdesivir is shipped to hospitals as normal.
Gilead says it has enough for the demand, but doctors surveyed via CNN say they don’t have enough supplies for all of their patients.
UCSF Health infectious disease specialist Dr. Peter Chin-Hong has said that at various events he is close to having enough for his Covid-19 patients.
“We were very close to falling off the cliff,” he said.
Then Chin-Hong came up with the concept of asking neighboring hospitals to borrow some of his remdesivir, promising that it would be returned when the next one arrived from his hospital.
“It is as if we were in a medieval market and trading chickens and goats,” he says.
A July survey of 131 hospitals through the American Society of Health System Pharmacists showed that nearly a third said they had gained enough remdesivir to treat all of their Covid-19 patients who were on the drug guidelines.
Kabir, the Bangladeshi doctor, said his hospital had received a lot of remdesivir because they were buying generic versions of the drug.
Doctors in other emerging countries said their hospitals were also generic.
“We have enough remdesivir in our country,” said Dr. Bilal Aziz, assistant professor at King Edward Medical University in Lahore, Pakistan.
“We have no shortage,” said Dr. Endymion Tan, an infectious disease specialist at the Metropolitan Medical Center in Manila, Philippines.
Generic remdesivir is manufactured by several companies, Beximco Pharmaceuticals in Bangladesh.
“We can do more. Lately we produce about 80,000 vials consistent with the month, and we have and to produce up to 150,000 consistent with the month, ”said Rabbur Reza, COO of Beximco.
But Gilead is authorized to sell remdesivir in the United States. There are no generics and Gilead has no competition.
Christopher Morten, a patent law expert at New York University School of Law, said the Trump administration could replace that if it wished.
Morten said the administration may simply be a law that allows the government to “open” patents so Gilead can continue to benefit from the drug, but other corporations would be allowed to make generic versions of it.
“The US government still has the strength, to put it colloquially, to break patents when patents get in the way of competition, and Gilead is guaranteed a fair refund under the same statute, so Gilead still I would make a lot of money. “money,” said Morten, deputy director of the Technology Policy and Law Clinic at NYU Law.
He said that in the remdesivir case, he thinks the government has a moment too.
The United States can legitimately claim to be a co-owner of the remdesivir patents, as government investment was required and they were required to make it, according to a co-authored article through Morten and James Krellenstein, co-founder of the COVID Working Group NYC. .
“I, the United States government, co-invented and co-owned the most significant patents on remdesivir,” Morten said.
Gilead disagrees, as does HHS.
“There are many patents for remdesivir, and the United States government has been involved in the search for some of those patents. The US government is listed as a co-inventor on any of the existing remdesivir patents, ”the HHS spokesperson said.
Today, the United States Government Accountability Office is investigating this matter.
In July, two Democratic lawmakers, Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and Carolyn Maloney of New York, asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate the discovery and the remdesivir.
“Remdesivir evolved with an estimated federal investment of $ 70 million, and Gilead has relied on key clinical contributions from government scientists,” wrote Women of Congress.
GAO expects to have a report by the end of the year, according to Candice Wright, acting director of the GAO’s Analysis, Assessment and Technology Science division.
She said her team spoke with officials from HHS and the Department of Defense, who have worked with Gilead on remdesivir.
“We know that there were federal contributions in peer-reviewed articles,” Wright said.
On its website, Gilead highlights the company’s paintings on remdesivir since 2014 with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the US Army Infectious Diseases Medical Research Institute and the National Institutes of Health.
In an email sent to CNN, Gilead spokesman Chris Ridley highlighted the role that Gilead, the government, has played in the development of the drug.
“The studies that led to remdesivir began more than ten years ago. Gilead researchers invented remdesivir, learned about its broad-spectrum antiviral activity, optimized the product formulation, and stepped up the production process. Although government investment tended to further characterize the remdesivir profile after its initial discovery, this did not result in the creation of the underlying intellectual assets minted through Gilead, ”wrote Ridley.
Ridley also said that government grants totaling about $ 76 million had been awarded to scholars who painted with Gilead, “a portion of which was used for his paintings with Gilead on remdesivir. “
“Gilead has invested more in studies and progression of remdesivir than in public sources,” he added.
But Morten, the NYU attorney, said it was transparent to him that Americans are paying twice for remdesivir: once to help expand it and once to buy it for the Covid 19 remedy.
“I think it’s worrying, it’s a genuine deal for Gilead,” he said.
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