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The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, considered this Friday that so far, the corticosteroid dexamethasone is the only therapy that has proven to be effective against covid-19, for patients with serious diseases.
In an online press conference from the organization’s headquarters in Geneva, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus insisted that according to data from the WHO-sponsored trial, the drugs remdesivir and interferon are not effective in fighting COVID-19.
The results of the study had already been published and were even questioned by the US pharmacist Gilead, who said they seemed “inconsistent”, noting that other trials validate the benefit of the antiviral.
However, at Friday’s press conference, WHO officials noted that interim trials show that remdesivir and interferon “have little or no effect in preventing death from COVID-19 or reducing the time of hospitalization “. , and the CEO noted that this was the largest trial ever conducted, involving 13,000 people from 500 hospitals in 30 countries.
The CEO recalled at the press conference that hydroxychloroquine was withdrawn from the study in June and that in July patients also stopped taking the combination of lopinavir and ritonavir.
The WHO chief official thanked the study participants, saying he hoped the full results would be published soon in a “major scientific journal,” adding that the trial is recruiting around 2,000 patients each month and will evaluate other treatments, including monoclonal antibodies and new antivirals.
The covid-19 pandemic has already claimed more than one million ninety-nine thousand deaths and almost 39 million cases of contagion worldwide, according to a report prepared by the French agency AFP.
In Portugal, 2,149 people died from 95,902 confirmed cases of infection, according to the most recent bulletin from the Directorate General of Health.
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