Last month, the owner of a small pharmacy in Greenbelt, Maryland, secured two dozen courses of Pfizer’s new medication for treating COVID-19, eager to quickly provide them to his high-risk customers who test positive for the virus.
More than a month later, the pharmacy, Demmy’s, has dispensed the anti-viral pills to just seven people. The remaining stock is sitting in neatly packed rows on its shelves in the suburbs of Washington. And the owner, Adeolu Odewale, is scrambling to figure out how to get the medication, Paxlovid, to more people, as cases have increased over 80% in Maryland in recent days.
"I didn’t expect that I was still going to be sitting on that many of them,” he said of the pills he still has on hand. "It’s just that people need to know how to get it.”