Is There a Cure For the Coronavirus?
Fuck the pandemic, a coronavirus, and self-isolation. I want scientists to find a cure for the coronavirus as soon as possible, to heal everyone and so that I could go to the store without a mask again.
Unfortunately, this is not yet possible. Do you read various studies on this topic? There have been some promising vaccine projects and one by one they fail. Let me try to tell you more about the most successful testing, which unfortunately stopped. Well, and of course about the reasons for this decision. It is difficult to explain complex medical and scientific facts in simple language, so get ready for complicated things, but at the same time very interesting!
In the United States, clinical trials of a potential cure for coronavirus have been stopped. Preliminary results of the experiment were summed up two weeks ago. American scientists said that the drug remdesivir accelerates recovery for one and a half times. After a couple of days, the authorities approved its use in hospitals before official certification. Now, according to media reports, without waiting for the end of testing, scientists transferred to the remdesivir control group, which previously took a placebo instead of a drug. They did this so as not to endanger people.
Remdesivir is a broad-spectrum antiviral drug developed by the biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences. It is a nucleoside analog of adenosine, which is administered intravenously in the form of a prodrug that quickly penetrates into target cells, where it turns into an active nucleoside triphosphate metabolite that integrates into the chains of incipient viral RNA inside the host cell. The drug leads to premature termination of viral RNA synthesis due to inhibition of RNA-dependent polymerase. The administration of the drug once a day provides stable intracellular levels of the active drug. The pharmacokinetics of remdesivir in patients with severe disease or in patients with renal or hepatic insufficiency, as well as the necessary dose adjustments, are unknown.
Remdesivir has been shown to exhibit antiviral activity against Ebola virus and other filoviruses in host cell assays. It also suppressed Ebola virus replication and protected 100% Rhesus monkeys infected with Ebola virus under experimental conditions from lethal disease. These results were obtained in a randomized, controlled trial of remdesivir. In which this drug was compared with antibody-based therapies in patients with the Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. However, the remdesivir therapy group stopped participating in the middle of the study, when it was found that remdesivir was inferior to the reference drugs, while the mortality rate when using it was 53.1% higher.
The antiviral drug remdesivir, designed to treat the Ebola virus, shortens the recovery time of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 by an average of 4 days but does not save the lives of seriously ill patients. These are the findings of the preliminary report on the results of the first randomized double-blind study of the effectiveness of remdesivir in the treatment of 1063 hospitalized patients with COVID-19, published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Gilead announced preliminary results of a study comparing a 5-day dose to a 10-day dose.
It was originally created to treat a different type of coronavirus infection. In a Chinese study that included 237 patients, it was not effective compared to placebo. The Americans included more than a thousand patients and they received a remdesivir or placebo. The study was well planned. More recently, an interim analysis was performed, and it turned out that the drug actually accelerated the time to recovery.
A team of scientists led by specialists from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases concluded that remdesivir reduces the healing time from 15 to 11 days for patients with COVID-19 and lower respiratory tract infections. “The preliminary results of these tests show that a 10-day course of remdesivir gave better results than placebo in the treatment of hospitalized patients with COVID-19,” wrote the scientists.
But the same studies have shown that this is not a medicine and that this drug does not work quickly. “These preliminary data confirm the use of remdesivir for patients who are hospitalized with COVID-19 and need additional oxygen therapy,” wrote the researchers. The article goes on to say that patients who have undergone mechanical ventilation have not revealed any significant positive effects.
COVID-19 studies on primates other than humans confirm that remdesivir can reduce the replication of the virus in the lungs and improve lung condition when applied at an early stage of infection. In the case of COVID-19 disease in humans, the problem is that SARS-CoV-2 virus replication is already peaking at the time of the onset of symptoms or earlier; and if antiviral therapy is not started a week or earlier before the maximum manifestation of symptoms, the drug may not be able to prevent or limit damage to the lungs and other organs.
No Effect on Mortality has been Proven
The latest data was presented on May 7, and it does not say that patients receiving placebo were given remdesivir. If mortality began to decrease with the use of the drug, then this would be a very compelling argument to stop the test. But this is not. One could follow this test very carefully, and as soon as we saw that the drug reduces mortality, stop this study.
This is a completely normal situation when, on the one hand, a clinical trial continues, and on the other hand, the application program expands on the basis of an intermediate analysis. You look at what happens, for example, with Plaquenil. There is generally no evidence that it helps, and they still use it.
The NIAID notes that if the test drug can at least help in the fight against infection, then severe patients who take a placebo instead (and even do not suspect about it) are at risk of dying only because they accidentally fell into the control group. But if you give an experimental medicine to all seriously ill patients, without exception, then the verification conditions are violated ‒ which means that it becomes impossible to determine the effectiveness of the drug.
However, scientists really often stop testing for ethical reasons, but this may turn out to be problems for the researchers themselves, says Doctor of Biological Sciences, Virologist Andrei Letarov:
“The situation when such things happen during an epidemic is really classic. For example, Felix D’ Errol, the inventor of the so-called phage therapy, in the course of a successful field experiment in India, at the insistence of the Indian government, abandoned the control group, and the bacteriophage drug was distributed to everyone.
Indeed, the epidemic then waned, but this led to the conclusion that Derrel’s results were not recognized as reliable enough, and then no one had the opportunity and the courage to accurately repeat this experiment. In general, this had rather negative consequences for the development of technology itself. Perhaps in an epidemic, this may be ethically justified. Then it will be possible to get to know the details of the effect of remdesivir on the pathological process: to find out why the viral load is not reduced, but it makes it easier for people. But this is an ethical decision, and it is very expensive for the authors of the study.”
So far, the effectiveness against coronavirus has not been scientifically proven for any drug. However, clinical trials of COVID-19 vaccines have already begun in the UK, Germany, the USA, and China.
