First Antiviral Treatment That Shows Results for Coronavirus

There is one drug that gave results in clinical trials, blocking the coronavirus/COVID-19 from spreading, and effectively cutting short the patient’s recovery period.

It’s called Remdesivir and results from clinical trials that used it and placebos indicate that the drug speeds recovery by a factor of 31% in a majority of cases. 

The news comes straight from the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases study and has a basis of randomly assigned 1,063 people that have been infected with COVID-19. 

The drug is administered via intravenous infusions and, since the trials, the median time to recovery went down to 11 days from the 15 days that those on the placebo experienced. This is extremely good news because it prevents patients from dealing with further organ damage from the virus.

This is not a cure, but a treatment though, and it has to be said that eight percent of the patients in the Remdesivir group had a fatal end, unlike the eleven percent in the group that was administered the placebo. 

This is a very early proof of concept for further treatments and, normally, researchers would have waited to make the announcement until the results had been reviewed by other scientists but, in this case, the organization decided to make an early report public. 

Dr. Fauci said: “Whenever you have clear-cut evidence that a drug works, you have an ethical obligation to immediately let the people who are in the placebo group know so that they can have access.”

Dr. Fauci stated that Remdesivir will now be the standard of care by which other drugs are judged and additional treatments will be adapted to add to the Remdesivir and antibodies that may protect against inflammation. 

As of now, Remdesivir may be the only proven weapon that we have against the coronavirus, but it can be compared to a sling and not a firearm that targets COVID-19 and blows it to Kingdom Come.