In what could come as a setback to the States which have invested in setting up infrastructure for conducting plasma therapy and launched plasma donation drives to treat coronavirus infected patients, the Centre is mulling to delete convalescent plasma as an investigational therapy from its treatment protocol guidelines.
Giving a hint in this regard, Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) Director General Professor Balram Bhargava on Tuesday said “discussions are on in the national task force on Covid-19 for deletion on plasma therapy from the national treatment guidelines”.
Governments in various States like Delhi, Karnataka and Maharashtra had touted this as an effective strategy against Covid-19.
The Centre’s consideration to ban the therapy comes after multiple international trials and the ICMR, which conducted the largest trial in the world, concluded that infusing blood plasma from a recovered patient showed no significant benefits on the eventual outcome of a Covid patient.
In April itself, the Centre had opined that convalescent plasma therapy can create life-threatening complications in a Covid-19 patient and is still experimental. Joint Secretary in Health Ministry, Lav Agarwal, had pointed out that the use of this therapy is “illegal” unless the medical facility administering it is part of a study being conducted by the ICMR.
Dr Bhargava said that we have “done the largest trial on plasma therapy in the world with 464 patients across 39 hospitals and with more than 350 authors. It has now been accepted in BMJ (the British Medical Journal) and we have received proof, it will appear very soon … more than 10 pages of hardcore science talking about the role of plasma in Covid.”
Bhargava, further said, “We have discussed this in the national task force and are discussing further now with the joint monitoring group that this (plasma therapy) may be deleted from the national guidelines. That is the discussions ongoing and more or less we are reaching towards that.”
At a press briefing earlier also, Professor Bhargava had said that the study demonstrated no benefit in mortality in moderate to severe cases of Covid-19. “It also did not arrest the progression of Covid-19 from moderate to severe,” he had said.