Chennai: As there has been mad scramble for Remdesivir injection, being used to treat COVID patients on oxygen support, the Tamil Nadu government on Sunday announced that the drug would be made available to public in private hospitals from May 18.
A decision to this effect was taken at meeting chief minister M K Stalin had with Health Minister Ma Subramanian and Health Secretary Dr J Radhakrishnan at the State Secretariat. The decision to sell Remdesivir in private hospitals was taken taking into account the chaos and the long wait by the relatives of the patients at the designated sites to get the drug and the possibility of such places becoming another source of spread
of COVID-19, an official release said.
As per the revised protocol for the supply of Remdesivir, the government directed the hospitals treating patients with the medicine to procure the drug by sending its own representatives to the designated collection centre thereby doing away with the present system of patients’ relatives queuing up at designated sites to get the drug.
The government will set up a dedicated website for this purpose in which the hospitals treating patients on oxygen support with the drug, will have to upload the patient’s details and the required quantity of Remdesivir.
”Once the request is reviewed and the medicine allocation is made, the hospital will have to send its own representative to collect it from the designated collection centre”, Mr Stalin said at the meeting. The details of the website will be announced by the government soon, the release added.
The Chief Minister also cautioned the hospitals to procure the drug to use it only on eligible patients. The hospitals should also charge the same price at which the medicine was supplied to it by the government.
Mr Stalin said Health department officials will keep track on the sale of the drug and prevent its sale in blackmarket. Mr Stalin also warned that legal action will be initiated against hospitals that seek the drug unnecessarily or do not follow the new protocol.
Inititally the drug was sold at the Government Kilpauk Medical College and hospital in the city. As there was huge surge in crowds, it was shifted to the more spacious Jawaharlal Nehru multi-purpose indoor stadium at Periamet for better crowd management. But it did not yield the desired results as there was a massive crowd for the drug and people jostled with one another, throwing physical distancing norms to the wind. Since only a limited quantity was sold, those who could not get the drug despite standing in the queue for long hours, staged a road roko agitation to express their anger and frustration. After Chennai, the sale of Remdesivir was also expanded to other districts like Coimbatore, Salem, Trichy, Madurai and Tirunelveli where also there was big crowd for the drug.
Mr Stalin also pointed out that WHO and medical experts have observed that the Remdesivir drug offers little benefit to those patients on oxygen support and did not provide any major relief to other patients. Despite this, there was heavy crowd at the drug selling points. To prevent big crowds during the pandemic, it was decided to sell the drug through private hospitals also, Mr Stalin said.