500 People Will Get Ten Day Clinical Trial for Antiviral Drug Versus Coronavirus

Doctors in Washington State gave remdesivir (Gilead antiviral drug) to the first coronavirus patient in the United States last week after his condition worsened and pneumonia developed when he’d been in the hospital for a week. His symptoms improved the next day.

Two clinical trials will take place in Wuhan, China, the center of the outbreak; 500 patients will receive the drug, and comparison groups will get a placebo. The patients will get the drug intravenously for 10 days, and then assessed 28 days after the treatment to see how they fared compared to the placebo groups

The New England Journal of Medicine -First Case of 2019 Novel Coronavirus in the United States

Remdesivir and chloroquine (anti-malarial) stops coronavirus in the lab.

Nature – Remdesivir and chloroquine effectively inhibit the recently emerged novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in vitro

China has begun clinical trials of remdesivir.

There are currently limited available clinical supplies of remdesivir, but Gilead is working to increase the available supply as rapidly as possible. They had stockpiled the drug in case of an Ebola outbreak.

25 thoughts on “500 People Will Get Ten Day Clinical Trial for Antiviral Drug Versus Coronavirus”

  1. 2% isn’t going to make much of a difference on population demographics, but 2% death rate times even just 100 million is a genocide-level tragedy. Anyone advocating plagues as population control needs to get their head checked.

    That said, if China wanted to kill off their elderly, they don’t need a virus for that. (And also, if they don’t mind the elderly dying, then it isn’t a timebomb either. They’ll just die naturally when the time comes.)

  2. Given that griffitsin, a lectin found in red algae, appears to have fairly broad anti-viral activity (including against at least some corona viruses), I am surprised it is not getting more attention. Some references —
    “Griffithsin, a Highly Potent Broad-Spectrum Antiviral Lectin from Red Algae: From Discovery to Clinical Application”
    https://www.mdpi.com/1660-3397/17/10/567/htm
    “Can Herbal Medicines Fight Wuhan Coronavirus?”
    https://www.leanmachine.net.au/healthblog/can-herbal-medicines-fight-wuhan-coronavirus/https://www.leanmachine.net.au/healthblog/can-herbal-medicines-fight-wuhan-coronavirus/
    “Griffithsin: An Antiviral Lectin with Outstanding Therapeutic Potential”
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27783038

  3. Combinatorics is speaking so logically I almost became a follower. Earth- Where common sense is an uncommon virtue.

  4. I kinda doubt the officials, they’re not up to it, they have no free press.
    Official numbers?…you have to wonder if its trade protection or health care.
    Seen video’s of death people pilling up around crematoria, they dont get all official labels..

  5. Bad time to break your arm or something in China. Many of the cases were caught in the hospitals. They need better air filtration systems or something.
    They built 2 new hospitals. If they build any more, they need to take into consideration the contagiousness of this disease and better protect the medical staff and other patients that may not have the disease.
    I am very concerned this is not just going to get out of hand in China. Singapore, Hong Kong… All the other countries need to step up and do a first rate job.

  6. Are you saying white and black people have partial immunity already? And here I thinking that Chinese Manufacturers were trying to sell the United States blankets laced with cronavirus….

  7. I assume the “28 days” later In antiviral study is a joke referencing the zombie Virus movie “28 days” where the person wake up in a hospital with an IV in her arm while passed out for 28 days and in the meantime all of civilization has collapsed because of zombie virus?

  8. Sounds like China’s found an answer to its One Child Policy demographic timebomb – just kill off the elderly and the infirm with stuff like Coronavirus.

  9. i mean in china there are 400 million people on lockdown and they have trouble containing it and in Nigeria everybody just goes their own way, is africa even on the map?

  10. Most people that died even from other nationalities were from Asian descent! This is conveniently not talked about in the mainstream media. I invite you all to search the intenet for black and white deaths… maybe you can come up with Connor Reed as a white welsman infected, but he recovered in the hospital.

  11. The reason for the double blind is that people will unconsciously transmit information to the patient which can affect the patient.

  12. Much higher and variable rate with the people who are hospitalized. They are turning people away from the hospitals. It is hard to know who to take in and who to send home. And that is going to very based on how many beds are available and who is doing the admitting. Certainly not the kind of variables you can just plug into a formula.

  13. Just swap IV drip A with IV drip B and don’t tell the semi-conscious patient what they are getting. With enough samples you will know if it is working.

    On the flip side I suppose His Excellency Lord Xi can get on television and explain why several hundred people are getting placebos. It’ll be a real made for TV moment.

    No, wait that would look bad? Well because it is bad.

  14. Yes, as long as you don’t expect them to have some weird interaction effect in the liver or something. Some classes of drug that can be a problem. But it’s not like they’d refuse to give you fluid replacement or fever reducers because they gave you an antiviral.

    And of course, that helps to blind the study. One IV has electrolytes, one has antivirals and electrolytes. No need to squirt some extra placebin (TM) in the IV bag, they look identical and are administered identically anyway.

  15. Or even in addition to the standard treatment. Doesn’t tell you as much, but still potentially useful.

  16. Yes, this. Most people think that trials like these are still run as “experimental treatment arm vs placebo” but really it’s “experimental treatment arm vs alternative standard of care”. That is, the experimental drug versus whatever drugs you would normally give the person. In this case there are things that they already give the infected, so we compare against that. And because there are perhaps multiple approaches to experimental treatment, we can run a trial with many more arms and simply compare them all against each other.

  17. Given the low recovery numbers so far (~6%), my impression is that most of the patients are still sick. That means the death rate may be higher than current estimates, but it takes a while to either die or recover. That also means that people with stronger immune systems may simply take longer to die. Current data says the deaths are mostly older people etc, but they may simply be dying more quickly. The good news is that the death rate seems to be stable at 2%, so more likely, you either die quickly(ish?) or recover slowly.

  18. No, you can do a head to head test where one get a flu medication or something.
    And sometimes the drug you are trying to test actually makes things worse. Then which is the happy group?

  19. Many view the use of a placebo is unethical but there isn’t another way of clearly determining whether the drug works or no. The test is usually doubly blind which means that neither the person giving the drug or the person getting it know whether they are getting the drug or the placebo.

  20. And there is no reason to worry about the placebo effect. Just give them an IV drip. I can’t imagine that informed consent is that big of the Doctor-State-Patient relationship in China.

  21. China is flooding their market with liquidity trying to stave off a recession due to the virus. I am pretty sure that money is not a problem.

  22. Not to be too rude here but if we know the mortality rate (officially 2%) then you can give everyone the drug and compare them to the known mortality rate and already established recovery time. Worrying about Placebos when 400 million citizens are on lockdown seems a smidgen unethical.

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