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. 2021 May 25;193(21):E771-E776.
doi: 10.1503/cmaj.210531. Epub 2021 May 5.

Managing drug shortages during a pandemic: tocilizumab and COVID-19

Amol A Verma  1 , Menaka Pai  2 , Sudipta Saha  2 , Sally Bean  2 , Michael Fralick  2 , Jennifer L Gibson  2 , Rebecca A Greenberg  2 , Janice L Kwan  2 , Lauren Lapointe-Shaw  2 , Terence Tang  2 , Andrew M Morris  2 , Fahad Razak  2
Affiliations

Managing drug shortages during a pandemic: tocilizumab and COVID-19

Amol A Verma et al. CMAJ. .
No abstract available

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests: Amol Verma and Fahad Razak are part-time employees of Ontario Health. Menaka Pai, Andrew Morris, Jennifer Gibson and Fahad Razak are members of the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table. Sally Bean and Jennifer Gibson are members of the Ontario COVID-19 Bioethics Table. Michael Fralick is a co-investigator for the SOLIDARITY clinical trial. He also received consultant fees from Pine Trees Health that has developed a CRISPR-based point-of-care diagnostic test for COVID-19. No other competing interests were declared.

Figures

Figure 1:
Figure 1:
Age-standardized eligibility for tocilizumab in Canada and the United States. Note: Age Std = overall estimate of age-standardized eligibility for tocilizumab among patients who were admitted to hospital with COVID-19. Age-stratified hospital admissions in Canada were reported by the Government of Canada, based on cases reported to the Public Health Agency of Canada to Feb. 18, 2021. Age-stratified hospital admissions in the United States were reported by the COVID-19-Associated Hospitalization Surveillance Network (COVID-NET) to Feb. 13, 2021, which represents about 10% of the US population. To provide a lower and upper bound on the tocilizumab eligibility estimate, we imputed all missing C-reactive protein level results as less than 75 and 75 mg/L or more, respectively.
Figure 2:
Figure 2:
A proposed 3-stage framework for managing tocilizumab shortage in Canada.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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