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Before Donald Trump went to the hospital, they gave him eight grams of an experimental drug. After his admission, he was also given the drug Remdesivir.
– Especially in the US, they have a tradition of over-treating VIPs. If you receive treatment you don’t benefit from, you only risk side effects and complications, writes internal medicine and cardiology physician Lars Mølgaard Saxhaug.
Lars Mølgaard Saxhaug believes that Donald Trump’s treatment may do more harm than good.
Photo: Private
Saxhaug is active on Twitter. When it emerged that the president had received an experimental drug, he sent an April tweet.
– I hear stories about people who believe they survived COVID-19 because doctors gave them “everything.” I wonder if they were so lucky to have survived COVID-19 and to have achieved “everything,” Saxhaug wrote.
Queues
The experimental medicine given to Trump will help destroy the virus.
It is a mixture of two of the so-called antibodies. Antibodies are small structures of proteins. They are shaped to stick to the virus. If enough antibodies stick to the virus, then they can’t do the job. They cannot penetrate your cells and create more viruses.
The Regeneron company drug is called Regn-CoV2.
They are artificially produced copies of antibodies. The company has obtained the original antibodies from people who have been through the disease and from mice infected with a human-like immune system.
A simple drawing of how antibodies work. The yellow and blue shapes that look like a Y are antibodies. They bind to the pale yellow tips of the virus so that they cannot bind to green receptors on human cells.
Photo: RSC
I do not know if it works
No research has been done to establish that it helps patients.
– We are trying to find out now, says future Norwegian health ambassador John-Arne Røttingen.
He claims that the drug is part of the large British RECOVERY study and that a decision will be made in a few weeks whether it will also be included in the Solidarity study led by the World Health Organization.
John-Arne Røttingen, executive director of the Research Council of Norway, says that the experimental medicine Trump receives would have already been used if we had known it worked.
Photo: Jonas Bendiksen / Research Council of Norway
Maybe it wanted to be published
Donald Trump himself left the White House when he went to the hospital to be admitted. Thus, he was healthier than a large proportion of typical covid-19 patients. When they arrive at the hospital, it is normal for them to have trouble breathing enough air.
– It may be that he went to the hospital in part to get the drug Remdesivir, writes Lars Mølgaard Saxhaug.
The background to that statement is that access to Remdesivir has been carefully controlled. In the United States, it is only allowed to be administered to patients admitted to the hospital. It was actually only intended for patients who were so ill that they needed respiratory assistance, but this was changed on August 28.
Beltsivir works for everything
– Remdesivir has been shown to provide somewhat faster recovery, and people admitted get a shorter hospital stay, says Røttingen.
It adds that it has not yet been established that the drug increases the chances of surviving a severe case of covid-19.
– This is something we are investigating here in Norway. We’ll get results pretty quickly, says Røttingen.
Remdesivir is a small molecule with great potential. Patients in Norway are now helping to find out if it can save lives.
Photo: Wikimedia
Sabotage the virus
Remdesivir’s task is the same as Regn-CoV2. They must ensure that viruses do not take over the biological machines in our cells to make new copies of themselves.
Remdesivir does this by sabotaging virus production in an infected cell.
Medicine is a not very complicated molecule, that is, a complex group of atoms. When this molecule enters a human cell, it uses chemicals in the cells to change. This altered form of the molecule attaches itself to the genetic material of the viruses that are being built. The result is that this construction stops. The cell stops producing functional viruses that can infect other cells.
