Scary news for patients with Covid-19—especially ones that are high risk. Veklury (remdesivir) for Injection 100 mg/vial, a medication for the treatment of COVID-19, has been recalled by the company after glass particles were found.
The FDA reports that the drugmaker, Gilead Sciences, received a customer complaint of finding glass particles in their vial. An inquest later confirmed the presence of glass, and the company issued a “voluntary” recall on September 20th. Scary!
This specific medication is for patients who have been hospitalized or are at risk for severe Covid-19 or death, making the recall news even more alarming.
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Veklury Recall: What Patients Need To Know
Gilead announced via a release that they were pulling the product Veklury® (remdesivir 100mg for injection) from shelves and hospitals nationwide after the presence of glass particles was found in at least one patient's medication. As of press time, no deaths or serious injury have been reported.
The company says that administering an injectable product that contains glass particles "may result in local irritation or swelling in response to the foreign material." But that's not all: the glass particulate can potentially travel through the blood vessels to various organs and block blood vessels in the heart, lungs or brain. This can cause stroke and or even death.
Gilead says the affected product has the expiration date of 11/2025, and was distributed nationwide to wholesalers from 07/16/2024 to 08/07/2024.
Medication Recalls On The Rise
Medication recalls are in fact on the rise. From 2021 to 2022, for example, the number of pharmaceutical recalls increased by 32.5% and the number of units recalled increased by 114%, a recent study shows.
And this is not the first U.S. medication to have been found to contain foreign objects recently. In May, blood pressure medication Treprostinil was found to have contained plastic pieces and was pulled from shelves immediately.
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