By Stephanie Nebehay and Josephine Mason.
GENEVA / LONDON (Reuters) – The World Health Organization (WHO) should soon obtain results of clinical trials it is carrying out on drugs that could be effective in treating patients with COVID-19, its Director said on Friday. General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
“So far, about 5,500 patients in 39 countries have been recruited for the Solidarity trial,” he said at a press conference, referring to clinical studies that the UN agency is conducting.
“We expect provisional results in the next two weeks.”
The Solidarity Trial began in five parts looking for possible treatment approaches for COVID-19: standard care; remdesivir; the antimalarial drug promoted by the President of the United States, Donald Trump, hydroxychloroquine; anti-HIV drugs lopinavir / ritonavir; and lopanivir / ritonavir combined with interferon.
Earlier this month, he stopped testing hydroxychloroquine on the arm, after studies indicated it showed no benefit in those with the disease, but more work is still needed to see if it can be effective as a preventative medication.
Mike Ryan, head of the WHO’s emergency program, said it would be unwise to predict when a vaccine might be ready against COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the new coronavirus that has killed more than half a million people.
While a vaccine candidate could show its effectiveness by the end of the year, the question was how soon it could be mass-produced, he told the UN journalists association ACANU in Geneva.
There is no proven vaccine against the disease now, while 18 potential candidates are being tested in humans.
WHO officials defended their response to the virus that emerged in China last year, saying they had been fueled by science as it developed. Ryan said what he regretted was that global supply chains had broken, depriving medical personnel of protective equipment.
“I regret that there is not fair and accessible access to COVID tools. I regret that some countries have more than others, and I regret that front-line workers died from that,” he said.
He urged countries to continue to identify new clusters of cases, to track infected people and isolate them to help break the chain of transmission.
“People who sit around coffee tables and speculate and talk (about transmission) do nothing. People who chase the virus do things,” he said.
(Edition by Michael Shields and Andrew Cawthorne)
