Seven-year-old Josh Hardy has survived four bouts of kidney cancer, heart failure and a bone marrow transplant. But now, he is fighting for his life once again, after a drug company denied him access to a medication that could cure him of a potentially deadly virus.
In an attempt to save her son’s life, Josh’s mother, Aimee Hardy, has launched a grassroots campaign to encourage drug manufacturer Chimerix to allow her son to have the medication he so desperately needs.
“I want to be by his bedside, holding his hand, telling him, ‘It’s going to be okay,’ but because of this unwillingness to release this drug, I have to leave him and come talk to you and it infuriates me,” Hardy, from Fredericksburg, Va., told Peter Johnson Jr. on Fox and Friends.
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Doctors at St. Jude recommended Josh be treated with Brincidofovir – an antiviral drug that has been proven to clear up adenovirus in children within two weeks. However, Brincidofovir has not yet been approved by the FDA, so Josh hasn’t been able to gain access to the medication.
Chimerix, the company that manufactures Brincidofovir, has given hundreds of patients emergency access to the medication in the past, but they have since stopped this practice saying ‘they cannot afford it,’ according to Johnson Jr. However, Chimerix has received more than $72 million in federal funding to develop Brincidofovir.
