Q Mr. President, what are you hoping to learn about China and the World Health Organization with this investigation you’ve commissioned with the intelligence agencies?
THE PRESIDENT: Right. It’s coming in and I’m getting pieces already. And we’re not happy about it. And we are, by far, the largest contributor to WHO — World Health. And they misled us. I don’t know. They must’ve known more than they knew because they came after what other people knew that weren’t even involved. We knew things that they didn’t know. And either they didn’t know or they didn’t tell us, or — you know, right now they’re literally a pipe organ for China. That’s the way I view it.
So I’m — we’re seeing and we’re looking and we’re watching. And again, we give $500 million — and we have over the years — from 400 to 500 for a long time, for many years. And China is giving $38 million. And yet, they seem to work for China. And they should’ve been in there early. They should’ve known what was going on. And they should’ve been able to stop it at the — you talk about the spread or stopping the embers; that could’ve — that could’ve been stopped there.
And then, why did China allow planes to fly out but not into China, but they allow planes to come out? And planes are coming out of Wuhan, and they’re coming out; they’re going all over the world. They’re going to Italy, very — very big time to Italy. But they’re going all over the world. But they’re not going into China. What was that all about?
Thanks for posting this. A lot of good information:
DR. FAUCI: I mean, I could do it later, after you do that, and present a little bit of detail because it’s quite good news. And I’d be happy to share —
THE PRESIDENT: That’s good. You want to talk about it now, if you want.
DR. FAUCI: Yeah. Yeah.
THE PRESIDENT: Go ahead. Please.
DR. FAUCI: Okay. So, a trial that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is the institute I direct, sponsored called the “Adaptive Co-Virus Disease Treatment Trial,” or ACTT1, was started in February 21st of this year. And it was a randomized placebo-controlled trial comparing the Gilead drug, remdesivir, with a placebo. It was highly powered with about 1,090-plus individuals. So it is the first truly high-powered randomized placebo-controlled trial.
It was an international trial involving multiple sites not only in the United States, but in various countries throughout the world, including Germany, Denmark, Spain, Greece, the UK, et cetera. The primary endpoint was the time to recovery — namely, the ability to be discharged.
When you have a study like this, we have a Data and Safety Monitoring Board, which looks at the data. And they are independent, so there’s no prejudice on the part of the investigators because they’re doing the trial or the drug is from a certain company.
The Data and Safety Monitoring Board, on Monday afternoon, contacted me on April 27th — first on Friday, the week before; and then again on April 27th — and notified the study team, namely the multiple investigators who were doing the study throughout the world, that the data shows that remdesivir has a clear-cut, significant, positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery.
This is really quite important for a number of reasons, and I’ll give you the data. It’s highly significant. If you look at the time to recovery being shorter in the remdesivir arm, it was 11 days, compared to 15 days. And that’s a p-value, for the scientists who are listening, of 0.001. So that’s something that — although a 31 percent improvement doesn’t seem like a knock-out 100 percent, it is a very important proof of concept. Because what it has proven is that a drug can block this virus. And I’ll give you an example in a moment of why we think, looking forward, this is very optimistic.
The mortality rate trended towards being better, in the sense of less death in the remdesivir group: 8 percent versus 11 percent in the placebo group. It has not yet reached statistical significance, but the data needs to be further analyzed.
The reason why we’re making the announcement now is something that I believe people don’t fully appreciate: Whenever you have clear-cut evidence that a drug works, you have an ethical obligation to immediately let the people who are in the placebo group know so that they can have access. And all of the other trials that are taking place now have a new standard of care.
So we would have normally waited several days until the data gets further to dot the “I” and cross the “T,” but the data are not going to change. Some of the numbers may change a little, but the conclusion will not change.
So when I was looking at this data with our team the other night, it was reminiscent of 34 years ago, in 1986, when we were struggling for drugs for HIV and we had nothing. And there was a lot of anecdotal reports about things that maybe did work, maybe not. People were taking different kinds of drugs. And we did the first randomized placebo control trial with AZT, which turned out to give an effect that was modest. But that was not the endgame, because building on that every year after, we did better and better. We had better drugs of the same type, and we had drugs against different targets.
This drug happens to be blocking a enzyme that the virus uses, and that’s an RNA polymerase. But there are a lot of other enzymes that the virus uses that are now going to be targets for this. This will be the standard of care.
And, in fact, when we look at the other trials we’re doing — we were going to do trial with another antiviral. Actually, it isn’t an antiviral; it’s an anti-inflammatory — a monoclonal antibody. We’re going to now compare the combination of remdesivir with this. So as drugs come in, we’re going to see if we can add on that.
So, bottom line: You’re going to be hearing more details about this. This will be submitted to a peer-review journal and will be peer-reviewed appropriately. But we think it’s really opening the door to the fact that we now have the capability of treating. And I can guarantee you, as more people and more companies, more investigators get involved, it’s going to get better and better.
So I’ll stop there, but I’d be happy to answer any questions.
Thanks for posting this transcript. I could not find a vid that includes the first few minutes - everything seems to start with Dr. Fauci’s remarks.
The setting seemed to lend itself to better behavior by the press and more useful questions from the press as well.
It seems to me we have had another “intelligence” failure: Where was OUR in-China monitoring of their labs, and more simply, the situation in the hospitals and on the streets when Wuhan got into serious trouble?
On the positive side, It is nice to see that Louisiana got a handle on this thing: For a while there it was looking dicey. And, maybe we have the beginnings of a way to have at this virus from a chemical approach.