Sen. Collins probes US health officials on coronavirus response

U.S. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) urged officials from U.S. health agencies to take action to stem the spread of the coronavirus at a Senate Health Committee hearing on the coronavirus this week.

Specifically, Collins said they should work to prevent drug shortages and protect Americans, particularly seniors in nursing homes and assisted living facilities, from the spread of the virus.

Collins authored the Mitigating Emergency Drug Shortages (MEDS) Act, which would enhance reporting requirements of potential drug shortages and help increase the supplies of drugs. She asked Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, if this bill would help his agency respond to this threat.

“The FDA has testified previously that only 28 percent of the manufacturing facilities making APIs (active pharmaceutical ingredients) to supply the U.S. market are located in our country. By contrast, the remaining 72 percent of API manufacturers supplying our American market are overseas, and 13 percent are in China,” Collins said. “[The MEDS Act] contains new reporting requirements that would help FDA gain far greater visibility into the drug supply chain, including where certain critical drugs are manufactured, the source of active pharmaceutical ingredients, and manufacturing contingency and redundancy plans. Given the problems that we’re already seeing, do you believe that the concepts included in our legislation…would be helpful?”

Hahn said the agency shares Collins’ goal of mitigating and increasing redundancy for manufacturing, particularly in the area of advanced manufacturing.

Collins also asked Dr. Anne Schuchat, the principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about their response to a coronavirus outbreak at a nursing home in Washington State.

“Infection control is always an issue in the different levels of health care, and the elderly are very vulnerable to respiratory viruses,” Schuchat replied. “We see that same differentiation in mortality with influenza as well, that the elderly are very vulnerable.”