Dr. Fauci says ‘Remdesivir drug can block the coronavirus’

WAHSINGTON DC: Yesterday, on April 29, Dr. Fauci, the head of the American National Institutes of Health and a member of President Donald Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force, said that the results from a clinical trial of a drug for treating the COVID-19  virus has shown “quite good news.

On Wednesday, Dr. Fauci told the reporters at White House that the data from a study of remdesivir showed patients who took the drug recovered quicker than those who did not.

According to Dr. fauci, remdesivir patients saw a 31 percent improvement in the outcome of their infection over patients who were given a placebo.

Dr. Fauci added “Although a 31 percent improvement doesn’t seem like a knockout 100 percent, it is a very important proof of concept,” Fauci said. “What it has proven is that a drug can block this virus.”Fauci said the drug will become “the standard of care” for COVID-19 patients.

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He said that the patients taking the drug, the median recovery time for those was 11 days. For those in the Placebo group, it was 15 days. The drug’s effectiveness suggests that it may help people who are very sick with the virus to survive it.

Gilead Sciences Inc., the company that developed remdesivir, received negative results about the remdesivir drug from a study in China which showed that the drug did not have the significant influence on the COVID-19 patients.

However, the clinical trial in China was stopped because they could not get a significant number of patients to test as the trial began when the virus was on a downward trajectory there.

Fauci said he didn’t want to “poo-poo” another trial, but that the lack of subjects hurt the research on remdesivir.