(CNN) -- After days of pleading with drug company executives, Josh Hardy's parents got what they'd been praying for: a chance to get medicine that could help their son survive. 
 
 The Chimerix pharmaceutical company said Tuesday that the ailing 7-year-old will receive medicine that doctors hope will help him when he becomes the first patient in a new trial set to start Wednesday. 
 
 Todd Hardy, Josh's father, said he got the call from Chimerix president Kenneth Moch about a half hour before the public announcement was made. 
 
 "It was wonderful," Hardy said. "Truly wonderful. It was overwhelming." 
 
 In an emotional Facebook post, mother Aimee Hardy praised the company's decision. 
 
 "Glory to GOD!" she wrote. "They are releasing the drug for Josh!!!!!!!!!" 
 
 The company had previously denied calls from the 7-year-old's family to give him the drug, brincidofovir, arguing that spending the time to help Josh and others like him would slow down efforts to get the drug on the market. 
 
 Josh's story drew national attention as his parents and supporters pushed the company to change its mind in online and media campaigns. 
 
 CNN told Josh's story Sunday night, describing his parents' desperate pleas for help from Chimerix. 
 
 Josh's journey began when he was diagnosed with a rare form of kidney cancer at 9 months old. Over the years, cancer turned up in his thymus, lung, and bone marrow, and each time Josh beat it. 
 
 But a bone marrow transplant left Josh without much of an immune system, and in February doctors diagnosed him with an adenovirus that spread through his body. 
 
 Now he's in critical condition in an intensive care unit as the virus ravages his body. Josh is in heart and kidney failure. He vomits blood several times an hour as his family gathers in vigil. 
 
 His doctors at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis had also been pushing for the company to provide the drug. 
 
 In a statement Tuesday, the hospital said it expected to receive the medication within 48 hours, but noted that its safety and effectiveness has not yet been established for use in children. 
 
 "It is also important to understand that this remains a critical and complex medical situation," the hospital said. 
 
 "St. Jude will continue to pursue state-of-the-art treatment for Josh and all of our patients. We are grateful for the efforts of Chimerix, the FDA and many others who worked to achieve this outcome. We ask that you continue to keep Josh and his family in your thoughts." 
 
 An FDA policy known as "compassionate use" allows someone with a serious or life-threatening disease to ask a drug company for an experimental drug. 
 
 Though it's called compassionate use, sometimes it feels anything but compassionate. 
 
 Companies often say yes: The FDA approved 974 compassionate use arrangements in fiscal year 2013. 
 
 But pharmaceutical companies often say no, as Chimerix did at first to Josh Hardy. 
 
 Moch previously told CNN he wouldn't back down from his decision not to give Josh the drug. 
 
 He said Tuesday that he hopes the new FDA-approved study will help other patients as well. 
 
 "I'm happy for Josh and I'm happy for many patients," Moch said. "We've come up with a way of helping not just Josh, but helping other patients in need, and there are many." 
 
 Over the past two years, the company has received more than 80 requests for compassionate use of brincidofovir from patients like Hardy, according to Moch. 
 
 Todd Hardy hailed Moch as a hero. 
 
 "He's a super man. He worked diligently on behalf of everybody," Hardy said. "His integrity was unquestioned. He was utterly professional." 
 
 A Facebook page dedicated to the online campaign to help Josh get the medicine posted a thank-you message to supporters Tuesday night. 
 
 "Thank you to every member of Josh's Army. The world has heard you and because of you Josh and many others will have the opportunity to receive CMX001 (Brincidofovir) the life saving antiviral drug made by Chimerix." 
 
 In cancer drug battle, both sides appeal to ethics 
 
 CNN's Ed Payne, Jennifer Moore and Jennifer Bixler contributed to this report. ||||| Josh Hardy, in the summer of 2013, when family members said he was at his healthiest. (Family Photo) 
 
 Just hours after social-media supporters of a dying 7-year-old boy pressured a reluctant biotech company into giving him an experimental medication, the backlash began. 
 
 Is “it rite to save 1 child an[d] not the rest?” wondered one commenter on a news forum. “It’s really not fair to the thousands of others that were turned down just because they didn’t make a big public outcry,” said another. 
 
 The Herald-Sun newspaper in Durham, N.C., where the company that makes the drug is based, said it was glad for the boy’s sake that he was able to get the medicine. “But the process leaves us pained,” the editorial board wrote. “This is no way to make health-care decisions.” 
 
 The story of how Joshua Hardy — a first-grader from Fredericksburg, Va., who is fighting off an infection after getting a bone-marrow transplant — got access to an unapproved treatment when others with similar requests were turned down highlights the ethical conundrums facing doctors, companies and regulators in the era of Facebook and Twitter. 
 
 In the days leading up to the drug company’s change of heart March 11, contrasting photos of Josh — smiling in baseball outfits and then lying in his hospital bed with tubes sticking out of his body — were all over the Internet. He has beaten cancer four times since he was 9 months old. But the disease has left his body without much of an immune system, and in February he was infected with a virus that left him close to death. 
 
 Nearly 20,000 people signed a petition supporting “compassionate use” for Josh, which allows a drug to be administered outside of a clinical trial. Hundreds bombarded Chimerix, a small, publicly traded company that makes the drug, with e-mails and calls on the boy’s behalf. Even Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III took sides, tweeting to his 1.12 million-plus followers to “#savejosh.” 
 
 Critics of the strategy say they sympathize with Josh’s parents and admire them for being willing to do anything to save their child, but they decry the crowdsourcing of medical decisions and warn that the case may set a dangerous precedent. 
 
 “You couldn’t get a more troub­ling and impossible-to-resolve moral dilemma than this one,” said Arthur Caplan, director of the division of medical ethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. 
 
 From the perspective of the public and future patients, it’s best for the company to focus on getting the drug approved as soon as possible so that the largest number of people can be helped, Caplan said. But from a patient’s point of view, getting immediate access to the drug is what’s important. 
 
 “It’s a trade-off between the public good versus self-interest,” Caplan said. “They conflict. There is no way of getting around it.” 
 
 Richard Plotkin, a 69-year-old retired trial lawyer from New Jersey who started the Max Cure Foundation after his grandson was diagnosed with lymphoma at age 4 and who was at the center of efforts to save Josh, defends the campaign as necessary. 
 
 “I knew we had at the latest until the end of the week before the boy would die, and the best way to make a company change its mind — fast — is to get the public involved,” Plotkin said. 
 
 The parents of 11-year-old Sarah Murnaghan also have faced intense criticism. The girl received two lung transplants (the first one failed) last June after her parents launched a Change.org petition that got more than 370,000 signatories and sued in an effort to get their daughter an organ more quickly. 
 
 Janet Murnaghan said she knows that not everyone agrees with the way her daughter’s case was resolved — a judge ordered the transplant network to put her on the adult list, and she jumped to the top because of the severity of her condition — but she believes it did the public good by demanding that patients and their families have a larger voice in how organs are allocated. 
 
 Since the early days of the AIDS epidemic, patients with life-threatening conditions have become increasingly vocal about demanding access to drugs still in development. The Food and Drug Administration in 1987 created new rules, amended in 2009, for expanded access or compassionate use to allow what it says is “broad and equitable access” to those treatments. But the program remains limited. Since 2009, the agency has approved an average of 1,030 applications each year; each request may be for multiple patients. 
 
 Most patients’ requests never make it to that stage. 
 
 Before the FDA gets involved, companies must agree to allow their drug to be used. But many companies are reluctant to do so for a host of reasons — legal, financial and logistical — and, in most cases, they hold firm despite intense public pressure. 
 
 Andrea Sloan, 45, a lawyer whose case drew the support of several Texas legislators as well as Newt Gingrich, died Jan. 1 while fighting for access to a drug to treat ovarian cancer made by BioMarin Pharmaceutical. Nick Auden, a Denver father of three with melanoma who was able to gather 500,000 signatures for a petition for compassionate use of a Merck drug, died in November without getting the treatment. He was 41. 
 
 The companies argue that if something goes wrong with a patient who gets a drug outside the clinical-trial process, it could slow down their larger development program while the FDA investigates. Moreover, insurance companies typically won’t pay for unapproved treatments, so either the drug companies have to bear the costs or give the treatment only to those who can afford it. The companies also often create only a small supply of a drug for clinical trials; making more or diverting it could be time- 
 
 consuming and costly. 
 
 Even if those challenges can be overcome, companies say, there are ethical issues. 
 
 Kenneth Moch, chief executive of Chimerix, which makes the drug that the Hardys were seeking, said that until 2012 the company had a large compassionate-use program but had to discontinue it to focus its limited resources — it has only 60 employees and is not profitable — on getting the drug approved. 
 
 During the past two years, Chimerix has nonetheless received 200 applications for compassionate use, and 80 were for adenovirus infections like the one Josh has. All of the requests were turned down. “Every one of those is heart-wrenching. But making it available for one child, whatever the reason, as an exception is not equitable distribution,” he said. 
 
 Chimerix turned down the Hardys’ requests, too. But after several days of intense phone calls with officials at the FDA’s Division of Anti-Viral Products — who heard about Josh’s plight through the media — they worked out a solution. 
 
 Instead of getting the drug through the compassionate-use program, Josh got it through the clinical-trial process. Although he wasn’t eligible for the trial in progress — it is for adults with a different condition — the FDA offered to immediately green-light a new clinical trial that would be designed for pediatric patients with Josh’s condition. 
 
 In this way, medical experts say, the FDA created a wall that would allow Chimerix to give Josh and up to 19 other children the drug for free without opening the floodgates to others. 
 
 The deal was also a big win for Chimerix: No only did it solve its public relations crisis, it allowed the company to cut through the red tape that is typically required to get another clinical trial approved. The company’s stock has soared nearly 29 percent since the news was announced Tuesday. 
 
 “There is no doubt that the social media campaign by the Hardys helped accelerate the dialogue,” Moch said. 
 
 Josh, who on Wednesday received his second dose of the treatment — an antiviral drug called brincidofovir — remains in intensive care at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. 
 
 His mother, Aimee Hardy, wrote hopefully on Facebook that the virus in Josh’s blood is replicating more slowly, and he is in less pain than before. “Glory to God,” she said, “the medicine is working.”
– After a social media campaign—and an avalanche of bad publicity—a drug company has done a U-turn and agreed to give a dying 7-year-old boy an experimental drug that could save his life. The FDA allows "compassionate use"of unapproved drugs in such cases, but the Chimerix pharmaceutical company had insisted that giving the drug to Josh Hardy, who developed a bone marrow disorder after cancer treatment, would delay efforts to get it to market, CNN reports. Chimerix president Kenneth Moch says Josh will be the first patient in a pilot trial for the drug. "Being unable to fulfill requests for compassionate use is excruciating, and not a decision any one of us ever wants to have to make," says Moch, who tells the Fredericksburg Lance-Star that he and his employees have received death threats amid a flood of pleas to help the Virginia boy. Josh is expected to receive the drug within 48 hours, though his mother fears he is running out of time. "Even though he is frail, he has a very strong will about him," she tells Fox News. "But things just keep stacking against him, and we just want to do everything we can to give him the opportunity to make a full recovery."