The government is paying for patients to receive convalescent plasma without knowing whether it works.
Two House Democrats are urging the federal government to invest in trials to find out whether a treatment derived from the blood plasma of Covid-19 survivors is effective.
Krishnamoorthi and Porter said they “had been made aware” that BARDA rejected proposals in early March for tests of immune globulin to prevent infection, and asked the agency to reconsider. They noted that the government is investing billions in vaccine research, but the largest study it has funded of immune globulin to prevent infection received just $34.6 million.
Hospitals and academic researchers are conducting a handful of trials that could take months to produce results. But the government has spent $187 million on convalescent plasma since April — without knowing whether the treatment works. Chaim Lebovits, a plasma donor and New York shoe wholesaler, helped to organize a large plasma donation system in New York, and is now working on the Florida project. He said the plan is to send Florida convalescent plasma units stored in New York, as well as to set up grassroots drives in different communities and have medical providers to reach out to qualified donors of plasma.
Arturo Casadevall, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Medicine who built a national system to link convalescent plasma donors and health providers, said he thinks the FDA will issue an emergency use authorization for the treatment. That would simplify its use for understaffed hospitals in states where cases are spiking, because they would no longer have to seek permission from the FDA to use the treatment outside of clinical trials.
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