The latest lab studies have found that the omicron-blocking antibodies will last for four months once someone takes a Pfizer-BioNTech booster dose. However, that is not the primary concern. The prime area of worry is that hospitals and the doctors don’t have access to the COVID medicines that they require.
The vaccine is getting treated as the central shield for COVID as the medicines are getting developed in the backdrop. In fact, people feel that vaccination passports are essential as the world gets prepared for COVID drugs. According to MyBioSource, 52% of people in Alabama, 59% in Arizona, and 60% in Kentucky feel that they should receive immunity passports after receiving the vaccine. While that enables them to move around freely, people should also urge the medical community to come up with a medicine to fight the virus.
The main treatments for fighting the virus
Unfortunately, we have very less medicines to combat the virus. And that is making certain hospitals and doctors to not have the necessary tool required to help a patient suffering from extreme COVID and to get the remedy that is the need of the hour. As a result, most hospitals are overwhelmed and don’t know how to ease the patient stress. It is one of the reasons of delayed recovery amongst patients.
Some experts suggest that today there are a vast array of drugs to treat COVID. There are easy-to-take pills as well. However, the demand for restricted treatments has resulted in specific state health departments and providers to focus on the patients and areas to obtain the drugs. Furthermore, the Biden administration is administering the shipments of probable treatments to places. However, the demand is more than the supply.
According to Scott Harris, who is the state health officer of the Public Health Department of Alabama, things are slightly challenging for the treatment provider. It is somewhat a theoretical consideration as most patients might not get the product.
The drugs off the table
The country comes with three monoclonal antibody therapy for treating the virus. And two of these treatments have a chance to be not effective for the Omicron variant. Recently, the Food and Drug Administration removed these two therapies from its list. Additionally, the federal government is stopping the distribution of two antibody medications to the state. All these leave us with one that is sotrovimab. Here the Biden administration is attempting to ramp up the supply by buying the extra 600,000 doses so that it gets delivered soon.
What all is available currently?
The federal government had decided to ship sufficient doses of sotrovimab to the states, more or less in part with the amount that gets delivered in the past four weeks. Also, the federal government’s allocation for the states is based on the formula of considering the case counts and the hospitalization rates.
The weekly allocation at West Virginia is above 250 doses for treating the ones that are affected by the virus. When you look at Alabama, you will find that the state has got about 558 doses recently. However, close to 8,000 requests for this treatment got poured in from the providers. Also, the state attempted to alternate where the doses go for it to be equally distributed in the urban and rural centers.
The Association of American Medical Colleges’ chief healthcare officer, Janis Orlowski, says that people are getting very careful about it. The medicines are being provided to people who are at an increased risk, unvaccinated, elderly, or suffering from cancer or other terminal ailments.
The COVID-fighting pills
Sometime back, the FDA had authorized the initial antiviral pills. One was from Pfizer and the other from Merck, including Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, its partner. The medical experts appreciated the medicines as a probable game-changer. Soon the efficacy of the pill was also got established.
It created a demand for another strong Pfizer pill, called the Paxlovid, but the supply was less. It was decided that the pills will get split amongst the states based on the need and the population. There would be bi-weekly shipments so that the states can have a sufficient amount of the pills needed to treat patients who are in need for it. George M. Abraham, who is the president of the American College of Physicians, asserted that the shortage of antiviral pills is considered universal. According to Sterling Ransone, President American Academy of Family Physicians, there were no patients who needed Paxlovid during his practice. The Biden administration increased the order to close to 20 million courses annually and will get disseminated as the drug gets manufactured.
Keeping in mind all the statistics, the medical community must check the pills that are effective for treating COVID-19 in patients. Also, there should be new pills that would target the symptoms created by the latest variants of the virus.
