I keep seeing posts pop up here about Israel but even their scientists say a vaccine would be six months away
and then it woud still have to get approved here, no?
This thread is about Gilead’s Remdesivir.
Remdesivir is NOT a vaccine, it is a novel antiviral drug in the class of nucleotide analogs. It is designed to TREAT the Coronavirus, not to vaccinate against it.
It was developed by Gilead Sciences and as a treatment for Ebola virus disease and Marburg virus infections, though it has subsequently also been found to show antiviral activity against other single stranded RNA viruses such as respiratory syncytial virus, Junin virus, Lassa fever virus, Nipah virus, Hendra virus, and the coronaviruses (including MERS and SARS viruses), and now, being tested for Covid-19.
BTW, Here’s the good news:
Remdesivir already has proven effective in lab tests against a range of coronaviruses like SARS, MERS and single-strand RNA viruses like Nipah virus.
Remdesivir has been proven to work against every coronavirus tested against whether in lab or animals. There is NO tests that showed no positive results.
There are also anecdotal evidence.
A U.S. man (the Washington case) and a French COVID-19 patient both recovered after being administered Remdesivir on a compassionate use basis. The French article wasn’t easy to find but it said the following (translated with Google translate):
The 48-year-old patient infected with the new coronavirus and released from the Bordeaux University Hospital on Thursday, after 22 days of hospitalization, was treated with remdesivir, a “promising” antiviral, said his medical team on Friday.”
It’s a promising sign that this patient was treated after 22 days. One question with therapies like this is how effective they are once you already are sick, and this is promising.
Of course,We should not derive conclusions from a handful of patients but it’s one more piece of the puzzle that helps raise the confidence level this drug works.
The only question is this — WHAT ARE THE SAFETY AND SIDE EFFECTS? This, we do not yet know.