FDA likely to approve Remdesivir as an emergency Coronavirus drug.

The chemical structure of Remdesivir. Wikipedia user Hbf878.

The FDA is likely to approve Remdesivir as an emergency Coronavirus drug after positive results from a US trial. The Hill. Remdesivir was developed as an anti-Ebola drug but has been used to fight the Coronavirus disease, Covid-19. The trial used 1063 sick people with the Coronavirus and showed that people that took the drug had a 31% faster recovery than the placebo. The treatment group also saw a lower death rate, 8%, than the placebo group, 11.6% but it was not statistically significant. 

My Comment:

This is potentially good news but I have to say that I don't fully trust any reports on drugs anymore. Without more information about this trial I can't say for sure how good of a trial it is. Other trials, including one in China, said that Remdesivir was less than useless.

These conflicting reports reminds me of the controversy over Hydroxychloroquinine. That drug, like Remdesivir, was promoted as a possible cure by President Trump. As soon as that happened the media reports went from positive and hopeful to the drug being fish poison that had killed someone because the President ordered it. The same thing may have happened with Remdesivir with the above Politico story coming from the WHO and China which have reasons to lie about the drug. 

What do I think? I think it's very possible that Remdesivir works. There is no reason it wouldn't work and I do think most of the trials have been positive, other than the Chinese study. It certainly doesn't seem like it's a panacea though and though it may help it's not a cure. 

However, I do wonder if we have done enough studies on the drug. Unlike the quinine based drugs Remdesivir is a new medication. It's only really been tried for Ebola and Covid-19 and it failed in the first case. We don't have good data on all possible side effects or long term problems it could cause. 

Cost is another issue. Unlike the quinine based drugs, Remdesivir is on patent and could be very expensive. The company that developed the drug, Gilead, hasn't revealed how much they will be charging but it's not basically free like the quinine based drugs are. Hopefully they won't be gouging people for the drug. I don't have a problem with them making a profit but this isn't the time for them to gouge us.

That being said, I do support it being used. One of the biggest problems we had with Coronavirus is that we did not have a good treatment for the disease. This meant that patients were either left with their own immune system as a defense or whatever drug the doctors thought might help. 

I do wonder if that the reduction in death rates compared to the early outbreaks in China and Italy is due to these treatments becoming widely available. I haven't heard any good explanation as to why the case fatality rate seems to be less than 1% when it was way higher in the early days and I think the treatment could be a plausible explanation. 

If Remdesivir proves to be a good treatment it's an additional good argument for opening things up. If there is a treatment out there that makes the disease easier to recover from and brings down the death rate (which isn't proven with Remdesivir but still) then there seems to be little reason to keep the hard lockdown we have right now. 

Finally, I wish I was more knowledgeable about investment. If I was I would have bought stakes in Gilead months ago. If I had in February, when I first heard rumors about Remdesivir being a treatment, I could have bought it at around $64 a share. Today that stock is worth around $83 and may go up further. Too bad I didn't because that would have been a nice profit for me...