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Old 03-28-2020, 10:05 AM
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blueash blueash is offline
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Originally Posted by billethkid View Post
in the event these drugs should ultimately be recommended, A new level of availability will need to be determined such that those who are currently on the drug are not compromised due to a rush on the existing availability.
That is an interesting comment. So I present to you an ethics question. For the question accept that there is a shortage of hydroxychloroquine. It has been shown to improve Covid patients in terms of deaths, severity of acute illness, needs for ventilators, and length of contagiousness. [none of this has been shown, just the givens for my question]

The drug is also useful for reducing the pain of patients with multiple rheumatological illnesses. But it is not critical to saving their lives nor prevent spreading of disease. Should the manufacturers not be able to crank up production by millions of doses a day as would be needed to combat Covid who should get the drug? In 2017 there were only 5.6 million scripts for hydroxychloroquine in the US.

Ideally of course making a triage decision will never happen. The drug companies [anyone hating on Big Pharma at this point?] hopefully have the reagents and the plant capacity to greatly ramp up drug production. I don't know if that is true, nor how hard it is to make hydroxychloroquine, nor if there will be purity and safety issues if some new company jumps into the market. "Here is your medication. It was imported by Smith Company from a manufacturer I've never heard of. The FDA has not had time to test their product but under the National Emergency we are skipping that step to have enough medication for everyone who needs it"

But it seems to me that it is going to be a lot harder to make a medication in a big hurry than it would be to make masks, or gowns, or other PPE. And we have seen that there is a long delay in getting those paper products available. If I were a drug company I would not be spending millions or billions making a medication that if the better studies show is useless will have been a waste of my time. I'd be calling the administration and saying "We can make hydroxychloroquine but I need a financial guarantee that the government will pay me back my costs if it turns out there is no market" And as most of the drug manufacturing is done outside of the US, are we all ok with our government covering a foreign company's risk? Do we then demand that the increased supply be sent here? Tough questions
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Last edited by blueash; 03-28-2020 at 10:11 AM. Reason: added drug # data