“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. But from a patient’s point of view, getting immediate access to the drug is what’s important. Moch summed up the dilemma faced not just by his company but by any drug researcher faced with a similar request. Chimerix, which is moving toward key trials for a promising drug called brincidofovir, had turned down the family’s request for the drug under a program called “compassionate use.” The Federal Drug Administration will allow a patient to be given an untested and unapproved drug if all treatment options have been exhausted and the drug company will pay. 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. 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.
– Seven-year-old Joshua Hardy is improving after a social media campaign convinced a drug company to give him an experimental drug that could save his life. But the backlash has been intense, with numerous observers expressing concern over the idea of "crowdsourcing medical decisions," the Washington Post reports. The problem? In order to help as many patients as possible, as quickly as possible, drug companies need to focus on getting their experimental drugs approved via clinical trials—not doling them out for compassionate use. (In Joshua's case, the drug company and the FDA ended up fast-tracking a new clinical trial rather than going the compassionate use route.) If something goes wrong with a patient using an experimental drug, the approval process could be delayed; it's also possible that the drug company would have to take the time to make more of the drug. Plus, there's the fact that since insurance companies usually don't pay for unapproved drugs, they could potentially be handed out only to patients who can pay. The idea of giving an experimental drug to one patient but not another, based solely on the story going viral, is an ethical quandary. "For Josh, we are glad," reads an editorial in the Herald-Sun, a newspaper in Durham, NC, where the drug company is based. "But the process leaves us pained. This is no way to make health-care decisions."