Medical Science has made another remarkable development that could prove to be an ice-breaker amidst the coronavirus pandemic. The United States Food and Drug Administration has on April 25, 2022 approved the COVID drug Remdesivir to treat infected patients who are as young as 28 days and weigh at least 7 pounds. With the recent approval, it has become the first COVID-19 treatment that has been approved for children who are younger than 12 years of age.
As per the FDA, in order to be eligible for treatment, the children need to be hospitalized or will need to have infected in the range between mild to moderate and at a high risk for progressing towards severe COVID-19. The drug has been made by Gilead Sciences and will be sold with the name Veklury, which has been approved to treat some of the adults and patients who are 12 years older or weigh at least 88 pounds. The drug is administered as an injection. Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni, the director of Centre for Drug and Evaluation and Research at FDA in a news release said that COVID-19 can cause severe illness in children as well and some of them do not have the vaccination option.
The doctor added that under such circumstances, there is a need for a safe and effective treatment options for this population. Talking about the COVID-19 vaccine for children, none has been approved or authorized for children younger than 5 years in the United States. Dr. Daniel Griffin, one of the instructors at the clinical medicine and associate research scientist appreciated the approval of remdesivir for younger children and called the drug as a very effective anti-viral that prevents the progression of COVID-19 towards more severe illness.
Dr. Griffin also said that remdesivir also lowers the risk of hospitalization or death when it is administered in the early course of COVID-19 infection.
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