Doctors and parents shocked as asthma medications pulled from the market | Eastern North Carolina Now

Biopharma corporation GSK (formerly GlaxoSmithKline) will cease the manufacture and sale of two extremely popular branded asthma inhalers beginning next year in favor of producing generic versions, triggering concerns about insurance coverage and product access.

Effective Jan. 1, GSK will discontinue its asthma inhaler Flovent HFA and inhalation powder Flovent Diskus. Instead, the company will be offering generic versions of these products at a lower cost. The generic version of Flovent HFA was launched in May 2022.

Discontinuation of Flovent HFA has raised concerns among medical experts as this is happening amid the respiratory virus season. Many insurers may not provide coverage for the generic version of the product.

As such, the Flovent discontinuation is happening at the “worst possible time of the year,” Dr. Cohen said.

Dr. Cohen is concerned that many patients, physicians, and pharmacists are not aware of the discontinuation of Flovent and that they will have to work out alternatives for the medication.

However, Arnuity and Qvar are not appropriate for children, Dr. Christopher M. Oermann, a member of the AAP Section on Pediatric Pulmonology and Sleep Medicine Executive Committee, pointed out.

Even if a preferred alternative is covered by insurers, switching thousands of children to the new medication would be a challenge, he stated.

“There are lots of children that are hospitalized every day in the United States with asthma exacerbations, and there are kids that die every year in the United States as a result of severe asthma exacerbations,“ Dr. Oermann said. “If those kids that are poorly controlled don’t have access to preventive inhalers, some of those kids could die.”