[ad_1]
Remdesivir, one of the drugs that Donald Trump took when he developed Covid-19, should not be used in hospitals because there is no evidence that it works, the World Health Organization warned.
The president of the United States was an enthusiastic advocate of drugs, to the point that in July he bragged that he had bought all the stocks in the world for Americans. However, the WHO guidelines committee has said that Covid patients may be better off without it.
The WHO issued what it calls a “living guideline,” which can be updated as evidence emerges, largely as a result of a Solidarity trial it conducted in several countries. Solidarity randomly assigned patients to various drugs, including remdesivir, and found that those who took it were no more likely to survive severe COVID than those who did not.
There are other problems with remdesivir. Manufactured by the American company Gilead, it is extremely expensive and must be administered intravenously. The guideline, published in the British Medical Journal, concluded that “most patients would not prefer intravenous remdesivir treatment given the low certainty of the evidence. Any beneficial effects of remdesivir, if any, are likely to be small and the potential for significant harm remains.
At the beginning of the year, there were high hopes for the antiviral drug, one of the few drugs that the US regulatory body, the Food and Drug Administration, gave emergency authorization for use against Covid-19. Some other countries also recommend its use.
Peter Horby, professor of emerging infectious diseases and global health in the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Medicine, who leads the Covid treatments recovery trial, said there was a need to rethink the way remdesivir was being used in the pandemic.
Solidarity, which analyzed the results of more than 7,000 adults admitted to hospital with Covid-19 in four randomized controlled trials, found no evidence of a significant benefit, he said.
Given this lack of evidence of any benefit on mortality, the risk of terminating a ventilator or the time to clinical improvement, the World Health Organization has reasonably recommended against the use of remdesivir in hospitalized patients with Covid-19, whatever let it be your illness. gravity.
“Remdesivir is an expensive drug that must be administered intravenously for five to ten days, so this recommendation will save money and other healthcare resources. Remdesivir has been recommended in various Covid-19 treatment guidelines, so this new analysis will require a rethink about the place of remdesivir in Covid-19. “
The oldest and cheapest drugs have shown real benefits. The steroid dexamethasone has been shown to save one in eight lives among seriously ill people in hospital with Covid.
Trump also took dexamethasone, although it was not in the seriously ill category and trials have shown it has little effect early in the illness. He also took a cocktail of antibodies from the Regeneron company, which is generally not available, although scientists believe it is promising.
