“I’ve had four or five different patients die from Covid when I’ve had the pills to help them and couldn’t give it to them,” one pharmacist said.
Will Gavin, a lobbyist for the law firm of Buchanan, Ingersol & Rooney, who has often worked with the FDA, said that the agency’s concern for the drugs’ supply likely influenced its decision as to who could prescribe it. Keeping prescribing powers in the hands of physicians would raise barriers, he said, but the goal is to ensure that very ill or immunocompromised patients could receive treatment while supplies remain limited.
“Through all this we’ve seen that communities that are in highest need are the ones that have the lowest access, and that certainly includes low-income people and communities of color,” said Dr. Taison Bell, the director of the medical intensive care unit at University of Virginia Health, who has spoken out about pandemic response fairness.
Men play basketball at Tropical Park, outside a site that had been administering monoclonal antibody treatments for Covid-19 until closing in compliance with federal regulations Jan. 25, 2022, in Miami.Arthur Caplan, a medical ethics professor at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, agreed, noting that people in the U.S. may lack insurance, a primary care doctor or even the internet — and they may also live far from a prescriber.
Companies like Color — a tech firm that has operated thousands of vaccine and test sites across the country — are attempting to address that infrastructure. Alicia Zhou, Color’s chief science officer, said the pandemic has shown how fragmented the U.S. health care system has become.
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