With the COVID-19 public health emergency ending in the U.S. next week, Congress is looking to use the lessons learned from the pandemic to draft a new iteration of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act to ensure the country is better prepared for the next pandemic.
President Joseph Biden signed into law the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, a bill that calls for investment of $280 billion overall into the development and manufacturing of semiconductor products and which should ease the crunch on these products for medical device manufacturers. However, some have estimated that bringing new production capacity online can take three to five years, suggesting that the med-tech industry will need to continue to devise workarounds to the current supply crunch for the immediate future.
The EMA has a list and it’ll be checking it frequently to avoid shortages with the help of COVID-19 marketing authorization holders and EU members states.
Another spate of U.S. FDA guidances for prescription drug manufacturers includes updates for carton labeling, product-specific advice and recommendations on mitigating potential drug shortages.
The shortage of semiconductor products, such as computer processors, was an artifact of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the shortage has yet to ease, to the detriment of hospitals, device makers and patients. That dilemma surfaced again as the U.S. Department of Commerce met with device makers to discuss the dilemma, which in the views of some still constitutes a crisis of health care.
Semiconductors chips, a key component in many medical devices, continue to be in short supply as COVID-19-driven supply chain disruptions continue. The shortage comes at the worst possible time, with demand for the chips on an upward trend. Nano-x Imaging Ltd.’s (Nanox) solution to the shortage was to open a semiconductor chip fabrication plant in Yongin, South Korea, to produce Nanox.source, a semiconductor chip that replaces the filament in the analog X-ray tube.
Medicine shortages have been of particular concern during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration said it would seek to amend regulations to allow imports of overseas substitute drugs if the Australian drug has been discontinued and canceled from the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods.
Medicine shortages have been of particular concern during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration said it would seek to amend regulations to allow imports of overseas substitute drugs if the Australian drug has been discontinued and canceled from the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods.
The availability of rapid antigen tests for the COVID-19 pandemic has been far short of ideal in recent weeks despite a recent order by the Biden administration for half a billion tests. The question of whether additional federal dollars are forthcoming for additional tests is up in the air, however, due to congressional concerns that there is roughly $800 million in unspent federal dollars, a signal that any additional monies might not be made available any time in the near term.
