Doctors anticipate patient requests for experimental remdesivir before all the evidence comes in
Before Wednesday’s hopeful news about the experimental antiviral remdesivir broke, doctors treating patients hospitalized for Covid-19 were already hearing from a few families desperate to get the drug for their loved ones. Now they expect to hear more pleas in the days to come, even though the data are preliminary, results are not available for clinicians to evaluate, and the drug is not yet approved for emergency use.
“Obviously, anything positive with regard to treatment is encouraging,” said Todd Sarge, medical director of the surgical intensive care unit at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “What concerns me has been these things get very much hyped up in the news, and [patients’ families] will definitely be requesting it more often. And that can be a difficult conversation between families and our clinicians because for one, it’s still experimental, and two, it’s not widely available yet.”
