A drug touted by President Trump as a promising therapy against COVID-19 may soon be harder for people to get their hands on.

Gilead Sciences, the developer of experimental drug Remdesivir, is putting emergency access to the treatment on hold amid surging demand, the company said Sunday, citing an “exponential increase” in requests to use the unapproved drug to treat coronavirus patients outside clinical trials.

“This has flooded an emergency treatment access system that was set up for very limited access to investigational medicines and never intended for use in response to a pandemic,” the company said.

Gilead Sciences said it is beginning to develop expanded access programs for the drug — which are expected to start within a similar time frame that new individual requests would have been processed.

Pregnant women and children under 18 with severe cases of COVID-19 may still individually request Remdesivir.

For now, the company is encouraging anyone else in need of the drug to participate in a trial.

“Enrollment in clinical trials is the primary way to access Remdesivir to generate critical data that inform the appropriate use of this investigational medicine,” the biotech company said.

No treatments or preventive vaccines have been officially approved for the novel coronavirus.

But Remdesivir — originally tested as an Ebola treatment and found to work against SARS and MERS, two other coronaviruses — has been credited with saving a Washington state man’s life. It also helped a 79-year-old man in Lombardy, one of the worst-affected areas in northern Italy, recover from the deadly bug.

Other potential treatments — like antimalarial drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, which is also used to treat auto-immune diseases like lupus — are also in short supply amid surging demand.

Pharmacy boards in at least four states — Texas, Ohio, Idaho and Nevada — have moved to restrict who can be prescribed the drugs and how much can be prescribed.

With Post wires