You are probably thinking about Remdesivir, Gilead’s drug that is approved to treat covid-19 in severe patients. I am not sure the status right now…whether all new manufactured doses are going to the US government or not, but I doubt it.
Many of the drugs and vaccines in development for covid-19 are already being manufactured ‘at risk’…sometimes funded by the government, sometimes by the mfr. If those drugs/vaccines fail in trials and/or don’t get approved, those doses already manufactured would be destroyed.
Regarding hydroxychloroquine, I have lupus and suffer with sun exposure. I generally have to start hydroxychloroquine in the spring, 6-8 weeks before the sun gets strong. It kind of ramps up in the system and takes that long to have effect on my lupus.
So with COVID I have wondered if this medication would be more effective if taken in advance, before getting COVID, just as I do with lupus. The other trials gave the med well into the course of the virus.
I never had any side effects with years of use. But another medication puts me in borderline territory for prolonged QT interval, the heart problem everyone keeps writing about, so I am not taking hydroxychloroquine until I can send my cardiologist a reading from my Kardia device.
If i were unlucky and get covid, how does a plebeian like me get remdesivir? Does one go to a certain hospital that one should research in advance when healthy and able to research such things?
Probably the gov is distributing remdesivir to hospitals. There will be glitches and some hospitals will get more than needed and some see shortages but most patients will get the medication, I would think. It works only if given when the patient is not too sick.
I highly (!!!) recommend TWIV (This Week in Virology) podcast Episode 632
In this episode, in the beginning segment, Dr Daniel Griffin does a informative review of the clinical course of infection, and current management.
He breaks it down from date of symptom onset & goes thru weeks one, two, three, & four and the complications generally seen (if there are complications) & treatment/management.
I have found the discussion in this episode very helpful.
The new hydroxychloroquine study from Henry Ford raises some questions.
The study was a restrospective observational study. That means the center initially decided to, and did, give hydroxychloroquine to most patients, according to guidelines, and gave some patients azithromycin with the hydroxychloroquine. (They didn’t give the drug to people with cardiac problems, for example, because it is known to have cardiac side effects.) Then, afterwards, they compared the people who got the drugs with those who didn’t, and discovered that people who got it were much less likely to die. They did some statistical manipulations to try to make the two groups similar, but critics say the groups were not similar.
For example, over twice as many patients who got the drug also got steroids. Steroids are believed to make a dramatic difference in death rates, so there’s a question as to how much of the death rate difference in the Henry Ford patients was due to steroids rather than hydroxychloroquine.
There’s another thing. The patients who didn’t get hydroxychloroquine had a surprisingly low rate of ICU care; a lot more of them died than went to the ICU. This is strange, because these were patients in the hospital–if they got worse, why weren’t they sent to the ICU? There’s a question as to whether the patients who didn’t get hydroxychloroquine were so sick when they went to the hospital that after they were evaluated, they or their relatives decided there was no point in pursuing aggressive care, and they were put on palliative care. But if on average the no-hydroxychloroquine group were sicker when they entered the hospital (because all of the very sick, palliative care folks were in the no-hydroxy group), then there’s no point comparing death rates between the two groups.
My takeaway? Get a puls-ox. Get tested, if you suspect you have it. Pay close attention to what day/week you are on (from first day of symptom onset). Stay in touch with your doctor.
Property timed steroids can help if you run into trouble day 10-14. Supplemental oxygen can help. Decompensating, if it’s going to happen, happens very quickly. The puls-ox will help you know if you might be in trouble soon.
Your MD might find you’re a good candidate for anti-coagulants (Week 3).
Your MD will want to watch for signs of bacterial infections in Week 4.
^^ But, please listen or re-listen. So much info from a MD who saw a lot of CV19 patients in NYC.
I am relistening. Thanks. That’s the episode they talk about horses. ? Another handy piece they talk about is the overuse of antibiotics. With the use of the steroid, was it intravenous or oral?
Interesting that they are using nebulizers. Our facility was advised not to use nebulizers (for respiratory medications such as albuterol, ipatropium, etc…) because of the fear that the nebulizer could aerosolize droplets containing virus, allowing the virus to stay in the air longer.
Pathologist found blood clots in “almost every organ” during autopsies on Covid-19 patients
From CNN’s Ralph Ellis and Andrea Kane
Autopsies on people who died of the coronavirus are helping doctors understand how the disease affects the body – and one of the most remarkable findings concerned blood clotting, a pathologist says.
Dr. Amy Rapkiewicz, the chairman of the department of pathology at NYU Langone Medical Center, spoke to Erin Burnett on OutFront Thursday night.
Some Covid-19 patients are known to develop blood clotting issues, but the degree and the extent to which that occurs was described as “dramatic” by Rapkiewicz.
In the early stages of the pandemic, bedside clinicians noticed a lot of blood clotting “in lines and various large vessels,” she said.
“What we saw at autopsy was sort of an extension of that,” she said. "The clotting was not only in the large vessels but also in the smaller vessels.
“And this was dramatic, because though we might have expected it in the lungs, we found it in almost every organ that we looked at in our autopsy study,” she said.
Rapkiewicz’s study outlining her findings was published at the end of June in The Lancet journal EClinicalMedicine.
BioNTech says its Covid-19 vaccine will be ready by end of 2020, but global immunity may take a decade
From CNN Health’s Gisela Crespo
German firm BioNTech is confident it will seek regulatory approval by the end of the year for a coronavirus vaccine, the company’s CEO told The Wall Street Journal in an interview conducted Wednesday and published on Friday.
Dr. Ugur Sahin said that due to the spread of the virus, it could take about a decade for the world’s population to achieve immunity, even if several vaccines become available at the same time. BioNTech has partnered with Pfizer in the US to develop the vaccine.
“I assume that we will only be done with this virus when more than 90% of the global population will get immunity, either through infection or through a vaccine,” Sahin told the Journal.
Sahin added the company could produce several hundred million doses before approval and more than 1 billion doses by the end of 2021.
Last week, BioNTech and Pfizer announced that the Covid-19 vaccine in development had yielded positive data in early tests.
The companies shared their preliminary findings on July 1 in a pre-print paper that shows participants in a Phase 1/2 study of the vaccine, called BNT162b1, responded to the immunization and it was found to be well tolerated. The Phase 1/2 study is ongoing and the data has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed medical journal.
The preliminary data will help researchers determine a dose level for the vaccine, then select which of their multiple vaccine candidates to progress to a larger-scale global Phase 2/3 study, which could begin as early as this month, the companies said.
The auxora looks hopeful. But it is always scary to read about 1:1 clinical trials with half getting placebo! Hoping for strong enough results so it can quickly go into standard of care.
Not getting my hopes up on vaccines as yet. Still wondering if we will need one every few months! The anti-vaxers and access issues around the world will have an effect. But cautiously hopeful.
My attitude is to try to delay getting this as long as possible, at least until there are more treatments. I feel terribly for those early patients who are now teaching medical folks so much about the virus.
New data shows remdesivir reduces Covid-19 patients’ risk of dying, but finding “requires confirmation”
From CNN Health’s John Bonifield
Drugmaker Gilead Sciences released new data on Friday that suggests the drug remdesivir can help hospitalized Covid-19 patients recover faster and reduce their risk of dying. However, the company said the mortality finding requires confirmation by clinical trials.
The analysis compared 312 patients treated with remdesivir as part of a clinical trial to a separate group of 818 patients who didn’t receive the antiviral drug.
In the analysis, treatment with remdesivir reduced risk of death by 62% compared to the current standard of care. The mortality rate for patients treated with remdesivir was 7.6% versus 12.5% for those not treated with the drug.
The analysis also showed that 74.4% of remdesivir-treated patients recovered by 14 days compared to 59% of patients in the other group.
The findings will be presented Friday as part of a Covid-19 conference at AIDS 2020, the 23rd International AIDS Conference. The data has not been published in a peer-reviewed medical journal.
“While not as vigorous as a randomized controlled trial, this analysis importantly draws from a real world setting and serves as an important adjunct to clinical trial data, adding to our collective understanding of this virus and reflecting the extraordinary pace of the ongoing pandemic," Dr. Susan Olender, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, said in the company’s press release.
Previously released data about remdesivir showed the drug helped coronavirus patients recover four days faster.
That study suggested patients taking remdesivir might be less likely to die, but there was not a statistically significant difference between those who were treated with the drug and those who were not.
