WHO Statement: Remdesivir ‘has little or no effect’ on survival
Anti-viral drug remdesivir has little to no effect on Covid patients’ chances of survival, a study from the World Health Organization (WHO) has found. The WHO trial evaluated four potential medications for Covid-19, including remdesivir and hydroxychloroquine.
Remdesivir was among the first to be used to treat coronavirus, and was recently given to US President Donald Trump when he was in hospital.
The drug’s manufacturer Gilead rejected the findings of the trial.
In a statement, Gilead said the findings of the study were “inconsistent” with others, and that it was “concerned” that the results have yet to be reviewed.
What did the WHO study find?
For its Solidarity clinical trial, the WHO tested the effects four potential treatments – remdesivir, an Ebola drug, was one, but they also looked at malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, auto-immune drug interferon, and the HIV drug combination of lopinavir and ritonavir.
Dexamethasone, a low-cost steroid now widely used on Covid patients in intensive care in the UK, was not included in this study.
The four drugs were tested with 11,266 adult patients in total, across 500 hospitals in more than 30 different countries.
The results, which are yet to be peer-reviewed, suggest that none of these treatments has a substantial effect on mortality or on the length of time spent in hospital, the WHO said on Thursday.
WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan said on Wednesday that their trials on hydroxychloroquine and lopinavir/ritonavir were stopped in June because they had already proven ineffective. However, the other trials continued.
The WHO’s results appear to contradict a previous study from earlier this month, conducted by Gilead, which concluded that treatment with remdesivir cut Covid recovery time by five days compared to patients given a placebo. About 1,000 patients took part in that trial.
What has the reaction been?
Gilead Sciences Inc dismissed the findings.
“The emerging (WHO) data appears inconsistent, with more robust evidence from multiple randomised, controlled studies published in peer-reviewed journals validating the clinical benefit of remdesivir,” the company said in a statement.
“We are concerned the data from this open-label global trial has not undergone the rigorous review required to allow for constructive scientific discussion, particularly given the limitations of the trial design.”
IMAGE COPYRIGHT REUTERSBut Prof Martin Landray, who runs the large trial Recovery in the UK, said the results of the trial were “important but sobering” – and added that there were already concerns about the cost and accessibility of remdesivir.
“Covid affects millions of people and their families around the world,” he added.
“It is not a rare disease. We need scalable, affordable and equitable treatments. The WHO Solidarity trial has done the world a huge favour by producing clear, independent and robust results, showing once more the value of large randomised trials in providing the knowledge we need to tackle the worst consequences of the pandemic.”
Remdesivir was given emergency use authorisation in the US from the country’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on 1 May. Later that month it was approved for use in the UK, and has since been authorised for use in several other countries.
Remdesivir has been touted as a potential therapy since the beginning of the pandemic and gained greater attention when it formed part of Donald Trump’s cocktail of treatments.
But the WHO trial, published online, gives a damning verdict.
There is a bit of uncertainty in the data, but the study says it “absolutely excludes” the idea remdesivir can save a significant number of lives and says the findings are “comfortably compatible” with the drug having no life-saving effect at all. It is a similar message for preventing people needing ventilation or speeding up people’s recovery.
So far, doctors have been raiding the cupboard for existing drugs that can fight coronavirus.
The results have been disappointing with malaria drugs, HIV drugs, MS drugs and now an Ebola drug (remdesivir). Only an old steroid – dexamethasone – has proven life-saving.
The attention is now turning to new experimental therapies such as antibodies designed in the lab to fight the virus and new, untested, anti-viral drugs.
We are still waiting for the results of these trials, but the worry is “new” in medicine tends to mean “expensive”, and that will raise questions about who gets to have them.
Read more at www.bbc.co.uk
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PSI Editor’s note: the above BBC story is posted simply to reflect the constant flow of junk science trying to discredit ‘old’ cheap, re-purposed generic medicine proven to work in saving lives. The BBC’s motive? To help their friends in Big Pharma, not least Bill Gates who is reported to have ‘donated’ £50 million to the BBC charity and who is also, like WHO, heavily invested in the ‘new’ highly-profitable mass COVID19 vaccination scam.
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AfricanIsraeli
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Meanwhile in the reality of life where chemistry doesn’t lie, unlike the massive majority of the elites in most of the worlds so called “medical establishments”, VIT D + VIT C prevent and cure the stupid coronavirus… without any of the nasty side effects of pharma drugs like remdesavere and HCQ
Darker people (with high melanin count) … need more VIT d because their skin makes it hard for the UVB rays of the sun to penetrate and begin the Vit D3 manufacturing in the human body … and most Caucasian folk need Vit D3 because in western nations the market / job structure is 9-5 with most of the work force not getting adequate sunlight hence most westerners are Vit D deficient
vit D3 is the most powerful anti microbial hormone chemical that humans (& other mammals [cathiliciden-Anti-Microbial-Peptides aka C-AMPs) have in their immune system…
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Dean Michael Jackson
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“Remdesivir was among the first to be used to treat coronavirus, and was recently given to US President Donald Trump when he was in hospital.”
When did IQs sink? Trump was never at a hospital, since there is no COVID-19.
In fact, we only see Trump signing a blank piece of paper (placing his signature in the middle of the blank piece of paper, no less!) in one photo said to be at the hospital, and he’s wearing the same clothing in that tight photo shot of him in the limousine ‘leaving’ the hospital.
What the PCR non-test is actually identifying is the green fluorescent dye(!):
“SYBR® Green I is a commonly used fluorescent dye that binds double-stranded DNA molecules by intercalating between the DNA bases. It is used in quantitative PCR because the fluorescence can be measured at the end of each amplification cycle to determine, relatively or absolutely, how much DNA has been amplified.”
https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/life-science/molecular-biology/pcr/quantitative-pcr/sybr-green-based-qpcr.html#:~:text=SYBR%C2%AE%20Green%20I%20is,much%20DNA%20has%20been%20amplified.
Without the green fluorescent dye, the PCR non-test is incapable of even ‘seeing’/detecting the billions of nucleotide sequences created, let alone ‘see’/detect a particular target nucleotide sequence to determine if similarities exist between the target nucleotide sequence and the databank nucleotide sequences. If the green fluorescent dye is removed from the PCR non-test, the result of the non-test will show 0% positivity 100% of the time!
At my blog, read the articles…
‘House of Cards: The Collapse of the ‘Collapse’ of the USSR’
‘Playing Hide And Seek In Yugoslavia’
Then read the article, ‘The Marxist Co-Option Of History And The Use Of The Scissors Strategy To Manipulate History Towards The Goal Of Marxist Liberation’
Solution
The West will form new political parties where candidates are vetted for Marxist ideology/blackmail, the use of the polygraph to be an important tool for such vetting. Then the West can finally liberate the globe of vanguard Communism.
My blog…
https://djdnotice.blogspot.com/2018/09/d-notice-articles-article-55-7418.html
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Andy Rowlands
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I would not expect the BBC to have anything positive to report about anything that goes against the entrenched polemic, just as they don’t with ‘climate change’.
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Charles Higley
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Zinc is recommended to go with HCQ. How is that not part of this trial. It was recognized early on that many ill people had zinc deficiency. As HCQ is an ionophore, it helps zinc to enter cells and used to fight virus replication.
This study parallels the European study that gave toxic HCQ doses to patients who were already very ill. The results were not pretty.
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