Federal prisons used just a fraction of the antiviral drugs they were allocated to keep incarcerated people from getting seriously ill or dying of COVID-19, according to new internal records from the Bureau of Prisons.
Prison officials have only prescribed 363 doses of antivirals since the first such drug proven to work, Gilead’s Remdesivir, was authorized in May 2020. At least 55,000 of the roughly 137,000 people held in federal prisons have contracted COVID-19; roughly 300 have died.
Experts have lamented that the number of therapies allocated to federal prisons has been wholly insufficient to blunt the COVID-19 surge in those facilities. But the new documents reveal that the number of incarcerated people actually receiving antiviral drugs is even smaller than the allocation numbers suggest.
Source: STAT News
