The coronavirus pandemic is reigniting a fierce debate over compounded drugs

Julie Dohm is quoted in STAT News regarding the FDA’s temporary policy allowing smaller pharmacies to make certain drugs for treating COVID-19 without first receiving a patient’s prescription for the drug. The condition for this new policy is that the pharmacies sell the drugs to a hospital that can prove it could not source the drugs from elsewhere. Ms. Dohm calls those provisions “pivotal” to the current regulatory framework. “If traditional compounding pharmacies can ship compounded drugs without patient specific prescriptions then there would be very little incentive, maybe none, for any compounding pharmacy to decide to become an [large-scale] facility,” she adds.