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US President Donald Trump has called the move of FDA as a truly historic breakthrough in the fight against the virus which he had been looking to do for a long time. The US Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization for the use of convalescent plasma to treat coronavirus patients, in spite of US top experts urging caution over its use. Trump said, “This is a powerful therapy. Today’s action will dramatically expand access to this treatment. The FDA really stepped up, especially in the last few days”. Point to be noted that convalescent plasma has been used on at least 70,000 patients suffering from the novel virus. The therapeutic treatment takes the plasma from people who’ve previously had Covid-19 and puts it into current patients.

Some doctors including the nation’s top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci have cautioned that more research is needed on the treatment before it is rolled out across the country. The director of the NIH (National Institutes of Health) Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Clifford Lane also expressed skepticism over the emergency authorization before the announcement. They said that a recent Mayo Clinic study (the largest one looking into convalescent plasma against the novel virus) did not provide enough data to prove the potential benefits. Doctor Lane said, “The three of us are pretty aligned on the importance of robust data through randomized control trials and that a pandemic does not change that”.

It is noteworthy that the FDA was prepared to issue the emergency authorization for the therapeutic last week. But these efforts were stalled after multiple doctors and experts advised against it. Trump appeared to express his dissatisfaction with the hold-up just a day before the announcement. He wrote on Twitter and said, “The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics”. The US Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar was also in attendance. Trump reaffirmed his tweet during the press conference and said that some members of the FDA needed to halt the therapeutic from getting the authorization.