I've been thinking about how the Right To Try Act might could play a role in ending the pandemic if it were amended to to allow patients to have access to therapeutics that are not currently approved or even authorized for emergency use by the FDA. Obviously, the members of congress that we currently have except for a few would never consider such a change to the Right To Try Act. This is what could make the Right To Try Act even better than it currently is. I'd love to see this law eventually amended where access to promising treatments that haven't been approved by the FDA for use could be extended beyond just terminally ill patients. Of course with any drug or treatment, a doctor would have to supervise the patients use of the drug.
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What experimental therapies do you have in mind?
Right to Try is much more strict than Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). Amending it as you say would still not give it the reach and flexibility of an EUA.
But neither is necessary for a doctor to prescribe approved medication that is already on the market — 20% of all prescriptions today are “off label”; the FDA has no regulatory control over how licensed doctors can practice medicine.
Any doctor could prescribe Ivermectin and HCQ, both approved drugs, no act of Congress required.
Regeneron (monoclonal antibody therapies) were given EUA status and 1.5 million doses were purchased under Operation Warp Speed.
The “pandemic” could have been over almost year ago. It isn’t lack of access to experimental drugs that is the problem.
CDC guidance for previous pandemics (swine flu, bird flu) made early treatment essential and recommended prophylactic antivirals for vulnerable communities. But their guidance for Covid is opposite and contrary to science — treating only the sickest, hospitalized, and long after the window when antivirals are effective.
This is a pandemic sustained by only public policy.
Doesn't it just piss you off. How much economic damage, fear, and deaths from nursing homes could have been avoided if we didn't play this simon says game with our rights for a whole year.
Remember! Two weeks to flatten the curve!