COVID-19 is an elegantly engineered virus, by nature or by man. It not only attacks the pulmonary system but is systemic, most likely via an explosion of the immune system, innate and adaptive. My guess, TLR-7 and IL-6, but time will tell, Along comes a writer in Science Translational Medicine who notes:
The New England Journal of Medicine today has the final report from the team studying remdesivir in a >1000 patient randomized controlled trial. This group was randomized and divided roughly half-and-half to standard of care plus remdesivir versus standard of care plus placebo, blinded. So this is the most solid look we have at the drug’s efficacy in coronavirus patients. The good news is that the patients receiving the drug had a shorter time to recovery (9 to 11 days, in the 95% confidence interval, versus 13 to 18 days with non-remdesivir standard of care. That’s real, but it’s not real dramatic, either, which is what you would realistically expect from a single broad-spectrum antiviral drug. This ain’t sofosbuvir clearing out hepatitis C, and even that one doesn’t do the job by itself. As for the hardest endpoint of all, mortality by Day 29 for these patients was 11.4% with remdesivir therapy as compared to 15.2% with the controls. So again, that’s a real improvement and very much worth having, but it’s not a Miracle Drug, either.
Frankly no surprise. This elegant virus demands a Cocktail approach. We said that in early April. Thus any criticism of this therapeutic agent alone is baseless in my opinion. Oncologists have known now for half a century that one must treat the full chain of events, assuming one knows them.
Thus, in my opinion, I would strongly suggest a criticism of one therapeutic is meritless. But I guess someone must fill the web site with something.
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