Doctors and parents shocked as asthma medications pulled from the market

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Doctors and parents shocked as asthma medications pulled from the market

Published: Tuesday, January 2nd, 2024 @ 11:11 pm
By: Beaufort Observer Editorial Team ( More Entries )

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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.

“This medication has been the most commonly used inhaled medication for the past 25 or 30 years,” Dr. Robyn Cohen, a pediatric pulmonologist at Boston Medical Center, told CNN.

“It’s the one that, overwhelmingly, pediatricians reach for when they decide that their patient needs a daily preventive medication. … The fact that it’s being discontinued is going to be a huge shock to the system for patients, for families, and for doctors.”

Insurance Complications

Since insurance plans largely do not cover the authorized generic equivalent of Flovent, patients may now have to get a new prescription for a different medication in the middle of the winter respiratory virus season.

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

“Flu, Covid, RSV—all these circulating viruses that are going around right now—are one of the biggest, if not the biggest, triggers for asthma attacks in kids. … This is what leads to kids being in the emergency room.”

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.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) reported that various insurance providers are handling the discontinuation of Flovent in different ways. Some companies won’t cover the generic or don’t consider it a preferred alternative to the branded medications.

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.”

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