Covid-19 Treatment: The Drugs, and the Debate
Current COVID 19 cases in Douglas County as of September 1, 2020. From the Douglas County COIVD Dashboard https://dogis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/21bec056a9a6449abcca89a329868fd6
Jeff Turner
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the debate has been persistent over two drugs that could serve as potential treatments for the Novel Coronavirus – remdesivir and hydroxychloroquine. This changed just recently, with new research from sources such as, Science Tech Daily stating that hydroxychloroquine, a drug touted by President Donald Trump as the best cure for the virus, is ineffective against COVID. The report, retrieved from the journal Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases – states that HCQ has not been successful in treatments of mid-to severe cases of COVID-19. President Trump has blamed this on the negative media coverage surrounding HCQ.
The study goes on to say that HCQ lacks in vivo (the scientific term for when a study is performed in a living organism) activity against COVID-19, and that HCQ’s cardiotoxicity (meaning, damaging to the heart ) is a major risk factor. “I ignore the politics around the situation. The political climate has not even slightly impacted the research we’ve done on HCQ,” UNMC Physician and Professor of the Department of Epidemiology, Dr. David Brent-Major said. The issue, in Dr. Brent-Major’s opinion, is that hydroxychloroquine is less understood but more readily available. HCQ – initially approved for malaria in 1955, has been approved for decades and has been used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus.
In contrast, many medical professionals have highlighted the usage of the drug remdesivir as a potential way to treat Coronavirus. Dr. Brent-Major said of remdesivir, “Currently there is an emergency use authorization (EAU) for remdesivir that’s based in research. The green-lighting of something like that is a careful process, one that’s worthy of respect.” remdesivir, a drug produced by the drugmaker Gilead Sciences Inc. – was once considered as a cure for Ebola during the outbreak in 2014. Prominent figures such as Dr. Anthony Fauci have held up the early remdesivir findings as cause for optimism, but the drug still has a long way to go before it's ready to be widely distributed in U.S. marketplaces.
Dr. Brent Major added,
“Every decision to use a drug like this should be an individual decision, taking the context of the specific case into account. – the side effects should be considered.” He continued, “the politics are exactly why it should be carefully researched.”
Dr. Andre Kalil, Director of the Transplant Infectious Diseases Department and Professor at UNMC has done a lot of research on remdesivir – including a study from UNMC earlier this year. According to a press release put out by UNMC, this study, which enrolled over one-thousand participants from ten different countries, found that “patients who were given remdesivir had a significantly faster recovery time than those who received placebo (a fake drug used for research purposes). By once calculation, the typical recovery time was 4 days less with this treatment(with the median time to recovery being eleven days for patients treated with remdesivir compared with fifteen days for those who received placebo).There was a ‘survival benefit’, with a fourteen-day mortality rate of 7.1% for the patients being treated with remdesivir in contrast to the placebo group – who experienced an 11.9% mortality rate in the same time frame. The study examined adults with moderate to severe cases of COVID-19.
Remdesivir is not a drug that you can get at your local pharmacy Dr. Brent Major explained,
“The process that gets us to where we need to be to have drugs ready is different to make the drugs available wide-scale. Remdesivir, for example, is not on the market – it’s just being distributed by the government among request”.
Dr. Kalil agreed with Dr. Brent Major that there was still work to do researching remdesivir, “This is not a cure, but it can make people get better sooner and survive,” he said.