The chairman of a key congressional health committee is demanding to see the formula used by the federal government to ration remdesivir, an experimental drug shown to speed the recovery of coronavirus patients.
Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat who chairs the House Ways and Means health subcommittee, said on Wednesday that the government’s “distribution of remdesivir seems akin to winning the lottery — a random stroke of luck rather than a medically-informed decision.”
His comments came in a letter addressed to US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, whose agency is distributing the drug. HHS has said the United States has enough remdesivir for about 78,000 hospitalized patients, but officials have never said how they’re deciding who gets the drug — and how much.
In his letter, Doggett explicitly asked Azar to provide the “formula HHS used to determine which states would receive how many doses of remdesivir and the delivery schedule for these doses.”
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News Credit
Author: Arman Azad
Publisher: CNN
Date: May 13, 2020
