Pregnant COVID-19 patient is only Wichita case to get newly approved drug remdesivir
An expectant mother from western Kansas, fighting coronavirus for her and her baby’s life, is the only Wichita case to get the newly approved antiviral drug remdesivir for COVID-19, her doctor said.
Remdesivir was approved by the Food and Drug Administration on May 1 for emergency use on the sickest COVID-19 patients, but supplies are short and are being rationed by the federal government.
Infectious disease specialist Dr. Thomas Moore has been treating coronavirus patients at Wesley Medical Center.
So far, the pregnant woman is the only one he’s been able to get remdesivir for, he said.
“She and her baby are both still alive,” Moore said. “She’s not by any means out of the woods. She’s still critically ill. But she’s not deteriorating rapidly like she was she came in. She’s on a ventilator, she was on dialysis, it’s pretty rough.”
Moore said he was able to get the drug based on a priority system that made it available for pregnant woman and children with severe COVID-19 disease.
Moore said remdesivir is the best drug yet found for treating the coronavirus.
“It’s by no means a cure,” said Moore. “But it’s certainly more effective than anything else we’ve got out there. It’s proven to have been effective in at least one randomized clinical trial. Whether that holds up in the most serious cases … is not clear.”
In the trial, “although it didn’t make patients get off the ventilator and walk out of the hospital, it definitely reduced the severity of the disease,” Moore said.
In addition to remdesivir, the woman is also receiving other treatments, including:
▪ Transfusions of blood plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients who have developed antibodies to resist the disease.
▪ A drug called tocilizumab, better known by the brand name Actemra. It’s an anti-inflammatory medication ordinarily used to treat rheumatoid arthritis that has shown some promise in reducing lung damage from COVID-19.
“I’ll just tell you, the patients who are the sickest, we’re just throwing at them everything that we can that’s proven to be effective,” Moore said.
Although the pregnant patient has stabilized, “it’s impossible to reliably state with any degree of medical certainty whether it’s the remdesivir that’s doing it, whether it’s the (tocilizumab) she got, whether it’s the plasma from recovered patients, two of those three, or all three.”
One thing he said he is certain of that remdesivir is “much better than the hydroxychloroquine, which has been shown to be essentially worthless.”
Small studies initially showed some potential promise for hydroxychloroquine, in combination with the common antibiotic azithromycin.
Prescriptions for it spiked after President Trump called it a “potential game changer” on Twitter March 21 and touted it in his daily coronavirus briefings.
But the drug didn’t live up to the optimism.
A large-scale study published March 7 in the New England Journal of Medicine found hydroxychloriquine really had no effect one way or the other on mortality rates nor the number of patients who had to be put on ventilators.
Supplies of remdesivir remain tight and analysts quoted by the financial publication Barrons say the shortage is expected to persist through the summer.
The Ascension Via Christi system has not been able to obtain remdesivir for any of its patients, spokeswoman Roz Hutchinson said Monday.
Moore said he has several patients who could benefit if remdesivir were available.
“I’ve got patients in the ICU that I would love to give the medication to now,” he said. “I’d like to give it to everybody who’s on a ventilator, but we can’t get it.”
He attributes the problem to mostly supply and demand.
“We’ve been asking for it every day and not been able to get it,” Moore said. “I think it has to do with number of cases or what-have-you. We could certainly use it, I’ll tell you that. We certainly have patients who could definitely benefit from it.”
Moore said Gilead Sciences, the maker of remdesivir, is producing it as fast as it can.
“That’s going to be distributed however the government needs to distribute it,” he said. “One presumes that they’ll be able to make enough for everybody eventually, but we need more now.”
On a national level, the roll out of remdesivir by the Trump administration has been criticized by physicians quoted in national media sources for a lack of transparent rules and guidelines to ensure that the patients who need it the most can get it.
Moore discounts various conspiracy theories surrounding the roll out of the drug, including one that postulated that states with Republican governors are getting preference over states led by Democrats.
“I’m sure that that is incorrect, but I have heard people throw out a bunch of nonsense,” Moore said.
He said he thinks the FDA’s emergency approval “increased dramatically the number of people (eligible to get remdesivir). I think with that dramatic increase in demand, the supply just hasn’t been able to keep up.”
This story was originally published May 11, 2020 at 3:25 PM.
