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Regardless of what happened in the placebo group, a 21% rate of serious adverse reactions is terrible.

It would be terrible if that's what they said happened, but it isn't.

Some patients had adverse events, which in general were just a worsening in condition as the disease ran it's course.

Only 4 of the 255 adverse events were attributed to Remdesivir or the placebo (2 each):

"Serious adverse events occurred in 114 patients (21.1%) in the remdesivir group and 141 patients (27.0%) in the placebo group (Table S3); 4 events (2 in each group) were judged by site investigators to be related to remdesivir or placebo. There were 28 serious respiratory failure adverse events in the remdesivir group (5.2% of patients) and 42 in the placebo group (8.0% of patients). Acute respiratory failure, hypotension, viral pneumonia, and acute kidney injury were slightly more common among patients in the placebo group. No deaths were considered to be related to treatment assignment, as judged by the site investigators."

Those taking Remdesivir had significantly fewer adverse medical events than those taking the placebo.

And almost none of them were "side effects".

I misspoke when I described the adverse effects as "side effects," but the difference between the two groups (21.1% versus 27%) does not seem "significantly fewer" to me; it seems attributable to chance or - at best - some slight benefit that might also be obtained from many other treatment options.

The other puzzling thing is that a placebo is supposed to be basically an inert factor, yet they attribute two cases of "side effects" to the placebo.

If I go to a doctor and he says, "This treatment option gives you a 5.9% better chance of survival than no treatment at all, or than some other treatment, I'm not going to jump up and down with joy. Just the other day I heard a doctor who specializes in these things say that he was unimpressed by early testing of remdesivir, a drug that has been in the works for years but has never been approved for anything.