EpiPen shortage alarms parents as school resumes
Jim Davis, a parent of an 8-year-old daughter who has a peanut allergy, was startled to learn that his Walgreens pharmacy did not have a single EpiPen available for her and wouldn’t have them in stock until well after school began.
The family keeps a stock of at least six injectors between home and school. Now they will have to rely on expired medication at home. Davis sent his only unexpired doses to his daughter Maggie’s fourth-grade class.
“You’re playing this awful roulette with your kid’s life,” said Davis, a high school teacher in Bowling Green, Ky.
A widespread shortage of EpiPens may mean children across the country will return to school without the lifesaving medication that prevents those with serious allergies from going into anaphylactic shock.
The scarce availability of the emergency medicines, caused by manufacturing issues and local supply disruptions, has been an issue for months. Sales of the auto-injectors typically spike during the back-to-school season, as parents buy twopacks of them to leave at school and refill expiring prescriptions to keep in childrens’ backpacks or at home. Now many parents are heading to pharmacies for fresh medications to find that they are in short supply.
The shortage — which can vary between pharmacies and is being described as “occasional spot outages” by federal regulators — presents bad options for families: Go from pharmacy to pharmacy hoping to get lucky or rely on an expired dose to save their child.
Schools often require parents to supply the medication before classes begin and typically won’t accept expired versions. Many have stashes of their own, but a program that provides free Mylan-brand EpiPens to schools is facing a backlog. Schools requesting the devices must now wait at least two months before their shipments arrive, a representative for the program said — about double the normal time frame.
It’s not clear how many kids would be affected. Nearly 6 million — roughly two in every classroom — in the United States have food allergies, according to the advocacy group Food Allergy Research & Education. But not all carry the devices with them or are trying to fill new prescriptions now. Three companies currently make epinephrine auto-injectors, but Mylan dominates the market, selling EpiPen and an authorized generic.
Parents are worried and angry, again, at Mylan, whose pricing tactics — raising the price 500 percent over a decade to more than $600 for a two pack — sparked a national furor over drug prices as well as a congressional inquiry.
Rajiv Malik, president of Mylan, told investors in early August that the supplies of the drug the company received from Pfizer, which manufactures the drug for Mylan, “are inconsistent and inadequate in meeting global demand, including in the U.S. As a result, supplies will continue to vary from pharmacy to pharmacy and may not always be available.”
Mylan told the Post it had no further updates on the shortages from earlier this month. Another company, Amneal Pharmaceuticals, said that its epinephrine auto-injectors are available after its manufacturer sent “intermittent supply of product” earlier this year. The Auvi-Q auto-injector, made by Kaleo, is also in stock and not experiencing outages.
“We are working closely with the manufacturers and monitoring their supply as the school year begins since this is historically accompanied by increased product demand,” FDA spokesman Michael Felberbaum said.
In an emergency, EpiPens are injected into the thigh to stop severe reactions triggered by food allergies or bee stings. The devices, which are sensitive to light and extreme temperatures, cannot be refrigerated, and EpiPens expire 18 months from the day they’re manufactured.