Remdesivir revisited

[bennevisplace]

Hitherto, Remdesivir has been used to treat Covid patients who are hospitalised and severely ill, with limited success.

Two articles were published in the NEJM yesterday, suggesting that the drug can be used to greater effect if administered at an early stage of infection. This would have implications for folks like us, who may remain vulnerable to Covid after several vaccinations and who may have difficulty in accessing monoclonals and antivirals that are in short supply locally.

The first article nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/N... reports on a study of Remdesivir for preventing Covid outpatients progressing to severe disease. It was a small, placebo-controlled study with a large precentage of subjects having comorbidities that would make them candidates for severe Covid. The group on Remdesivir had a calculated reduction in risk of 87 %.

The second nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/N... puts this study in context "The Goldilocks Time for Remdesivir" and in its concluding remarks states "Rapid emergence of variants with adaptive mutations in the spike protein can result in escape from vaccines and monoclonal antibodies, whereas antiviral agents, given the absence of variation in their viral target, are likely to maintain activity, reinforcing the value of antivirals such as remdesivir in curtailing the pandemic".

[1962jns]

Remdesivir is also bad for the kidneys.

[LeoPa in reply to 1962jns]

As is ivermectin. We had people that landed in the hospital semi conscious with a 1000 fold overdose. They took the version for animals. Doctor said "pls remember you are not a horse". It'd be funny if it wasn't tragic.

[Justasheet1 in reply to LeoPa]

Leo,

I eat like a horse. Does that count?

Jeff

[LeoPa in reply to Justasheet1]

Only if it's grass and nothing but grass what you eat 😁

[SofiaDeo]

Where's the reference to valid study for your statement? If you don't have one, please remove your comment.

[Jm954 Administrator]

You need to provide a reference for this onu1tadi2 or your commen will be removed.

Jackie

NOTE: response from @onu1tadi2 now deleted

[AussieNeil Partner Administrator in reply to Jm954]

onu1tadi2, in accordance with our community guidelines, please provide the requested reference or your reply will be deleted. The only reference I've been able to find on remdesivir and ivermectin in combination, actually isn't for these drugs treating people with COVID-19, but in a mouse cell study from July 30th 2021, using Murine hepatitis virus (MHV) on the RAW264.7 mouse macrophage cell line. MHV is a coronavirus that infects mice and shares some sequence identity to SARS-CoV-2. That's a long way from proven use in human COVID-19 infections!

See the PubMed abstract:

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/343...

In full:

frontiersin.org/articles/10...

Note the conclusions, with my emphasis:-

"The limitation of our study is that antiviral activities of drugs were investigated only against MHV in the RAW264.7 macrophage cell culture model. For direct comparison versus MHV, future detailed studies are thus warranted to evaluate the potential utility of this drug combination against SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses (e.g. SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, HCoV-229E, HCoV-OC43), such as multi-dose checkerboard experiments to ascertain additive effects of drugs (Bakowski et al., 2021). This caveat is also critically important given the observations of cell line-dependent compound efficacy against SARS-CoV-2 infection reported in many previous SARS-CoV-2 antiviral studies. For example, Vero cells, human Huh-7.5 liver cancer cells and human Calu-3 lung epithelial cells exhibit major differences in sensitivity to drugs with antiviral activity due to the distinct entry pathways utilized by SARS-CoV-2 in these cell lines (Dittmar et al., 2021). Also necessary are in vivo experiments using suitable animal model(s) of COVID-19 before progressing onto clinical trials in SARS-CoV-2 infected patients."

Neil

[LeoPa]

Can I have a Remdermectin infusion please 😁😁