Doctor Fauci has announced a breakthrough in the quest for a COVID-19 remedy after a test found that an antiviral drug called remdesivir could block the deadly virus.
Results that came in from a federal drug test reveal that a minimum of 50% of patients treated with remdesivir improved fast and were released from hospital in a short period of time.
Last Wednesday, Gilead Sciences noted that the antiviral drug helped patients with bad cases of COVID-19 who were administered the drug earlier than those who received it later.
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director and member of the White House Coronavirus task force, Anthony Fauci, had the following to say:
“The data shows that remdesivir has a clear-cut, significant, positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery.”
“This will be the standard of care,” he said.
“When you know a drug works, you have to let people in the placebo group know so they can take it.”
“Although a 31 percent improvement doesn’t seem like a knockout 100 percent, it is a very important proof of concept because what it has proven is that a drug can block this virus,” he added. “This is very optimistic.”
He described the results of the research as
“reminiscent of 34 years ago in 1986 when we were struggling for drugs for HIV.”
US President Donald Trump added:
“Certainly it’s a positive, it’s a very positive event.”
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is currently working on making remdesivir widely available, with the FDA hoping to get the drug to people in need as soon as possible.
Scientists did not compare the impact of the drug’s effect against a control group of people who did not get the drug.
Remdesivir is administered through an IV and is made to stop the virus from copying its genetic material.
The research, made by the National Institutes of Health, followed two control groups of 397 people in hospital with COVID-19: one group was given remdesivir for 5 days, while the other was treated for 10 days.
According to Gilead more than 50% of the people who were treated in both groups were able to leave the hospital in a period of two weeks.
The results show that 64.5% of people who went through the 5-day-long treatment “achieved clinical recovery” and 53.8% of people who went through the 10-day-long treatment got the same benefits.
“These data are encouraging as they indicate that patients who received a shorter, five-day course of remdesivir experienced similar clinical improvement as patients who received a 10-day treatment course,” Aruna Subramanian, a lead investigator of the study, said.
Having a treatment could have a blissful effect on the crisis, especially since health experts have said that developing a vaccine could take between 12 to 18 months.
Currently a minimum of five big studies are making tests with remdesivir, which has been effective against coronaviruses in the past and in laboratory tests with the current virus.
See Dr. Fauci’s press briefing regarding the treatment in the link below.
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