Doctors enraged at Trump administration's botched, opaque distribution of COVID-19 treatment

The experimental anti-viral drug remdesivir has shown such great promise for treating COVID-19 that it received emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration so it could be distributed to hospitals as fast as it can be produced. Then the Trump administration stepped in to start the distribution of the limited amount of it available for patient treatment, as opposed to research, now. Typical of this total corrupt fiasco of an administration, no one knows who's deciding where it goes and why it seems to be going to some hospitals and not others.

"In my opinion, and I think in the opinion of many of my colleagues, there is a complete lack of transparency about how this decision is being made and who is making it," Daniel Kaul, an infectious disease physician at the University of Michigan told Stat News. His hospital isn't getting any of the treatment. Paul Biddinger, director of Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center for Disaster Medicine, says his center is getting it, but "I legitimately do not have any insight into how hospitals were selected." Most of the rest of Massachusetts hospitals aren't getting any. He said his team has asked the state's Department of Public Health if federal regulations will allow them to give that agency their hospital's allotment so that it can be redistributed to where the need is greatest.

Axios' Jonathan Swan is calling this a "complete breakdown in communication and coordination within the Trump administration" and it's hard to argue otherwise. He reports that more than 32,000 doses have been shipped and delivered so far to seven states: Indiana, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Virginia. But, he writes, an administration official tells him that many doses went to "less impacted counties."

"Some went to the wrong places, some went to the right places," a senior official told Swan. "We don't know who gave the order. And no one is claiming responsibility." So we're off to a great start here, as usual. And it looks like Vice President Mike Pence is getting ready to throw the already teetering HHS Secretary Alex Azar under the bus. Pence supposedly ordered Azar to "take more ownership for getting remdesivir to the places where it's needed" in a meeting Wednesday. And Azar is trying to pass that buck. "Azar distanced himself from the debacle despite the fact that one of his top officials, assistant secretary for preparedness and response Robert Kadlec, was intimately involved in the distribution plan."

While they're busy pointing fingers Jared Kushner is probably intercepting the doses to give them to friends of Trump. Meanwhile, the developer of the drug, Gilead, still hasn't announced a price for the drug. One academic teams has estimated that it costs about $1 per day to make, and that's what the company should charge. However, the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) says that the company would be justified in charging as much as $4,500 for a 10-day course of treatment. Barring specific legislation preventing companies from price-gouging on treatment or vaccines for coronavirus, Gilead is probably going to go the $450/day price.

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