COVID-19 Medication Pulled From Shelves After Glass Particles Found

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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