Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Panel: Not Enough Data To Support Plasma Therapy
A National Institutes of Health panel said there's no evidence backing the use of convalescent plasma to treat coronavirus patients and that doctors should not treat it as a standard of care until more study has been done. "There are insufficient data to recommend either for or against the use of convalescent plasma for the treatment of COVID-19," the panel of more than three dozen experts said in a statement posted on the NIH website Tuesday. (Fox, 9/1)
The Trump administration has been accused of politicizing health departments, among other federal agencies, during the pandemic, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which issued new guidance in August that asymptomatic people exposed to the virus shouldn't be tested, recommendations that were strongly criticized and resulted in its director, Robert Redfield, backtracking in subsequent statements. (Perez, 9/1)
The NIH panel is not saying definitively that the treatment will not work, but it is saying that randomized clinical trials, the scientific gold standard, are needed to determine its effectiveness. The FDA issued its emergency authorization based on a less powerful kind of study, where some people with higher doses of the treatment had an improvement over some with lower doses, but without a control group of people who did not get the treatment at all for comparison. (Sullivan, 9/1)
