Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by londons_explore 2172 days ago
The drug that looked very promising for the last pandemic, yet turned out to have no benefit, and now looks very promising as a treatment for this pandemic...

Smells to me like someone in the remdesivir marketing department is doing very well... Are there any scientific studies that don't have vested interests and show it's a good treatment?
3 comments
latchkey 2172 days ago
There is a lot of competition. I think everything is on the table right now.

https://covdb.stanford.edu/compound-list/

link
aaaxyz 2172 days ago
This smells an awful lot like the Tamiflu story. Rumsfeld was chairman of Gilead until he was nominated as Secretary of Defense. He refused to sell his shares in the company and thus was forced to leave the room whenever discussions that might impact the company happened. A few years later the Pentagon starts stockpiling billions of dollars worth of Tamiflu. By the time Rumsfeld left the white house, Gilead shares were up from $7 in 2001 to $67 in 2006.
link
koheripbal 2172 days ago
I'm confused. Are you saying he had an ulterior motive? Tamiflu is effective when given early. The stockpiles (which I doubt amounted to the billions) were for the general US population in case of a super-flu. ...so it was a good idea.
link
koheripbal 2172 days ago
Clinicians more-or-less agree that Remdesivir has some minor beneficial anti-viral impact if given at the earliest moments of infection (like within 12 hours of infection), and some lesser beneficial impact later in cases where the body has trouble getting rid of the virus.

Covid-19 doesn't kill you. Those most sick in their 2nd and 3rd weeks are usually made very sick by their immune system's own inflammatory immune response (cytokine storm).

What this means is that Remdesivir could be very effective for patients that have known exposures and are in high risk categories.

...but, for most clinicians, since it needs to be given intravenously, it's not usually part of the clinical response (for the moment).

This is why the manufacturer (Gilead) is working on an oral delivery system. ...and we should all be supportive of that, because a broad use anti-viral might be very useful for covid-19 as well as other future viral diseases.

Still - what's going to save us from covid-19 is going to be a vaccine (and some degree of herd immunity).

link