It’s a general chain-terminator type RNA antiviral which imitates the A nucleotide. If you imagine someone is trying to build a giant single-stack of Lego blocks, it’s like substituting a bunch of their blocks with ones that won’t connect to other Lego blocks on the top. If they happen to use one of those, that’s the end of their stack-building effort. It does that when the virus is trying to replicate its own genome. You don’t really target individual viral polymerases doing that, you develop the drugs and then see if they work against specific polymerases.
BdB was absolutely correct.
BTW, this is an important point:
Götte said it is disappointing that antivirals discovered at the time of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak of 2003 – which might have been effective against COVID-19 too – were never translated into widely available treatments, largely because of the huge cost involved in developing new drugs.
“This time around it’s obvious that we have to cross the finish line,” he said.
“Ten billion dollars, it seems a lot, a huge amount,” Götte said. “But in the context of this pandemic and the costs associated with this pandemic, it’s nothing.”
It might be nice if we had a drug-development system which looked forward at what might be best at protecting the welfare of the human race, as opposed to one which is driven by profit and therefore focuses on developing 20 different flavors of statins, SSRIs and boner pills.
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Well, I never
Fauci did the same thing during the AIDS epidemic.
I don’t think there’s a significant effect on the efficacy of the study
Did you file a claim under Americans with disabilities? Some people have very sensitive skin and can’t wear shirts.
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Gotta give the people what they want
Hmm ok interesting. I like that analogy, thanks. So do you think there is anything useful to be learned by remdesivir being effective? Like, is it helpful to know that a chain terminator antiviral worked, suggesting we should try more of them?
“At first we assumed it was a mishap with a load of gefilte fish.”
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Cliffs
Outside>indoor good ventilation>Indoor poor ventilation
Lots of caveats but evidence all pointing in the same direction.
Kudos to the author of pointing at the various studies limitations but not losing the genera thrust in total.
(As a scientist I’d love to see cleaner results but sometimes you have to take action on the best info available).
Clearly meat processing facilities need to step up their air turnover game with excellent filtration and non horizontal flow.
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/new-study-reveals-the-best-conditions-for-spreading-coronavirus/
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The idea isn’t new, for example acyclovir was patented in 1974. One problem is that you’re imitating something which is also used by the body, which means you’ll be lucky to get away without nasty side effects. For remdesivir:
That being said, about 25% of patients receiving it have severe side effects, including multiple-organ dysfunction syndrome, septic shock, acute kidney injury and low blood pressure. Another 23% demonstrated evidence of liver damage on lab tests.
The other thing is that your drug might quickly become the victim of resistance. A small change in the viral RNA polymerase enzyme might make it able to distinguish real Lego blocks from your fake ones. In fact, researchers saw such resistance develop to remdesivir in a mouse hepatitis virus:
Here, we show that GS-5734 inhibits murine hepatitis virus (MHV) with similar 50% effective concentration values (EC50) as SARS-CoV and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV). Passage of WT MHV in the presence of the GS-5734 parent nucleoside selected two mutations in the nsp12 polymerase at residues conserved across all CoVs that conferred up to 5.6-fold resistance to GS-5734, as determined by EC50. The resistant viruses were unable to compete with WT in direct coinfection passage in the absence of GS-5734. Introduction of the MHV resistance mutations into SARS-CoV resulted in the same in vitro resistance phenotype and attenuated SARS-CoV pathogenesis in a mouse model.
Translation: “We found mutations which decrease effectiveness of the drug, however those same mutations nerf the virus. When we introduced those mutations into (the original) SARS, it likewise both made it resistant to the drug and made it a lot less generally effective as a virus”. That’s good news for the drug. Bad news would be “we found mutations which cause resistance to the drug and the virus is just as effective in mutated form, oh well back to the drawing board”.
In a rational world we would have developed drugs like this which work against coronaviruses in general and then stockpiled them as a defence against a long-predicted novel coronavirus pandemic. Developing a drug in the hope that it might come in handy in 20 years is not a profitable plan for a corporation though.
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An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
I’ll stay home until I know I’m not winding up in the hospital for 11 days instead of 14.
I hope the general public get this because if this “cure” is used to justify dumb risk taking it’s going to end up killing way more people then it helps. This has kind of been my take since they started hyping this drug from the get go.
Its not like you test positive and then go fill a script and stay home in bed for a few days.
I don’t know about the rest of America but my financial situation is not the greatest and I don’t want to risk a five figure hospital bill so I can make my boss, who’s eighty year old something ass is for sure staying home, a little extra money to add to his billions.
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My take on the remdesivir study is that it is good news and highly likely to be good medicine. Like, who here would elect not to take a drug when they were sick with the flu that shortened their flu symptoms but didn’t make it any less likely that they died from the flu? That is a big win! And that is what the data are showing. People want stuff like that to be true so badly that they buy into bullshit like vitamin c and zinc for colds. It is actually especially important for covid-19, a disease where people are frequently hospitalized for long periods of time in hospitals that are near, at, or over capacity. The drug may not save lives itself, but an empty hospital bed very well could.
The best thing about the downward trend in deaths, which I think Fauci has some self interest in playing up a bit too much, is that it is very unlikely that there is a trade off, shorter symptoms for a slightly increased risk of death. That is also good news! It is very important that drugs show that they don’t increase deaths, and there is no reason to believe this one does.
The only bad news is that it is reasonably likely that we could have shown a stronger statistical significance that this does result in a small decrease in mortality on its own with a larger sample size, but given the data so far, it it is unethical to ask people to continue to be in the control group. Would any of you volunteer to suffer longer to try to show that this drug could have also saved your life?
My main question is how much treatment with this drug costs. Shortening symptoms is good, but the price we should be willing to pay for that is much lower than that for lower mortality.
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I got a box of disposables here
https://www.newegg.com/hengrunxin-20200325-face-mask/p/N82E16887879009?Item=N82E16887879009
It always says backordered but I got mine in a week or so.
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The footage from 0:16 onwards is from Victoria Square, which is the absolute dead center of downtown Adelaide. Weird that it made it in there, normally you don’t even see kangaroos in the inner suburbs. I guess maybe there are some living in the parklands, but I never see them.
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State of Utah is offering a free washable mask to any resident who wants one. Up to 6 per household. Delivery in 3 weeks. I went ahead and ordered one.
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In other Straya news, the Australian Capital Territory, which is a small territory around Canberra, just like the District of Columbia, has zero cases today and zero active cases, so they can tentatively claim to have eradicated the virus. They are an enclave within NSW, the worst-hit state, but are geographically isolated from the NSW hotspots.