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The company’s assets in Rocky Mount were heavily damaged, and many products used in hospitals gave the impression of having been affected. This could further exacerbate the shortage.
By Christina Jewett
A tornado caused severe damage to a Pfizer drug production plant in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, on Wednesday, threatening materials for hospitals across the country.
The company estimated that a quarter of the injectable drugs it delivers to U. S. hospitals are available to injectable drugs. UU. se manufactured on the Rocky Mount property, adding drugs used in surgeries and other procedures to block pain, keep patients sedated and fight infection.
While the company has yet to disclose the extent of the storm’s impact, video footage and interviews with the Nash County Sheriff and others briefed on the damage indicated the tornado caused the most damage to the company’s warehouse.
On Thursday, Pfizer declined to comment on which drugs were affected or how much of their origin was destroyed in the tornado, which may be significant given that many of those drugs required careful production and handling to ensure sterility.
It is also unclear to what extent the destruction would exacerbate the national shortage of existing medicines, which has reached a 10-year high in recent months. Hospitals are on high alert because low-cost locally manufactured generic products, such as the sedative propofol, are already among the most prone to shortages on the market.
“From a medical professional’s perspective, I’m holding my breath,” said Michael Ganio, senior director of the American Society of Health System Pharmacists.
The tornado crossed a 16-mile swath of the Rocky Mount area, about 50 miles east of Raleigh, around 12:30 p. m. m. of Wednesday. It smashed trees at the base and threw houses 20 yards from its foundation, according to a summary by the National Weather Service. The tornado reached wind speeds of up to 150 miles per hour before ripping giant chunks off the steel roof of a Pfizer building and toppling giant trucks in the parking lot. Sixteen other people were injured, but no deaths were reported.
Several other people said the tornado caused the most damage to a corporate warehouse; The impact on the production plant, and its ability to continue generating medicines, is still unclear, according to Mittal Sutaria, senior vice president of pharmaceutical contracts at Vizient, which supplies drug contracts to hospitals.
She said Pfizer and the Food and Drug Administration have groups to assess the harm.
Dr. Sutaria, who said Vizient has been in contact with Pfizer, added that the Rocky Mount site makes anesthetic products, adding propofol, which is used to put patients in surgery to sleep, as well as fentanyl and morphine, which are used in intravenous lines to control pain. It also makes vancomycin, an antibiotic given to fight serious infections, and muscle blockers, adding succinylcholine, which is also used in surgery.
Keith Stone, the sheriff of Nash County, where Rocky Mount is located, told local reporters Wednesday that much of Pfizer’s construction was broken, the roof was crushed and up to 50,000 pallets of medicine were destroyed.
One hundred cars were also injured, adding forklifts scattered on nearby exercise tracks, Sheriff Stone said in an interview Thursday. “It’s just amazing what can cause so much damage and come out so quickly,” he said.
Steve Danehy, a spokesman for Pfizer, said Thursday that the company’s Rocky Mount team is “working very hard to process and assess the situation,” but did not provide details. The company said its staff survived the tornado without serious injuries.
Pfizer is expected to communicate its findings to the Food and Drug Administration, which is tracking the shortage.
“We are closely monitoring the situation and collaborating with the company to understand the extent of the damage and any potential impact on the country’s drug supply,” said Chanapa Tantibanchachai, a spokesman for the agency.
The Rocky Mount plant, established in 1968, employs another 4500 people and has 24 filling lines and 22 packing lines. While not as giant as Pfizer’s production complex in Kalamazoo, Michigan, North Carolina encompasses 1. 4 million square feet of production space. Drugs manufactured at the plant are also shipped to Japan, Canada, Brazil and other countries.
The fast products manufactured at the Pfizer plant, and the market share they represent, are not public information. However, the company sells dozens of injectable products, adding intravenous antibiotics, anti-seizure drugs used in brain surgery, and even an antidote to coral snake venom.
Many Pfizer drugs were already in short supply before the tornado: About 130 products advertised in hospitals were listed as “out of stock” and about a hundred others were in “limited supply,” according to the company’s 660-product list.
Pfizer has other production facilities in Kansas, New York, Massachusetts and Wisconsin, where the company can move some production to alleviate shortages resulting from the destruction of Rocky Mount.
Soumi Saha, senior vice president at Premier, a company that outsources drugs to hospitals, said Pfizer has a strong track record of building with some redundancy, so products are made at more than one site.
If the storm damage is limited to the warehouse and does not affect production schedules at manufacturing plants, it could mitigate potential shortages, he said.
Dr. Ganio recalled other drug shortages caused by errors in production areas.
Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, leaving hospitals scrambling for IV bags. Another occurred last year when China, which has been hit hard by covid, stopped generating a contrast dye for CT scans and other medical imaging. And in recent months, doctors have warned that survival rates for some cancer patients are in jeopardy due to production disruption at a production plant in India after the FDA cited primary quality defects.
Given the troubling shortages that so many people are experiencing, which has resulted in hoarding of some drugs and bartering between advocates who exchange and find rare drugs for the most desperate, lawmakers and federal officials have been discussing answers in recent weeks.
On Thursday, Senate lawmakers passed a pandemic preparedness bill through a key health committee. It contained provisions to stop shortages and generate drug brand reports to alert the FDA to circumstances that could lead to shortages so the Agency can help them.
The bill would also require an FDA report within 90 days of the law’s passage on the agency’s ability to deal with shortages and whether it wants more from lawmakers.
However, the natural appearance of a tornado is a stark reminder of the need to better control shortages.
“This reinforces the need for resilience in our chain of origin and genuine preparedness, not only for the next pandemic,” said Dr. Saha, “but for any unforeseen cases that create shocks in our chain of origin. “
Christina Jewett covers the Food and Drug Administration. She is an award-winning investigative journalist interested in how the paintings of the F. D. A. They affect other people who use regulated products. More information about Christina Jewett
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